Category Archives: Death and dying

A difficult conversation with her family led to a better death for my patient | Ranjana Srivastava

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Helping grieving relatives reach a difficult decision without hectoring or judging is a fine art

“What kind of God would do this?” she sobs and rocks. I am sinking in my chair and the nurse is perched on the side table. To focus on something other than her palpable despair, I regard the worn sofa and imagine a public hospital meeting room with comfort and sunlight. When a daughter arrives, she squeezes in beside her grieving mother.

She is a woman plainly devoted to God and her children, especially the unmarried daughter who is now my patient. The second daughter strikes me as thoughtful and educated, and as becomes evident, helpless to stem the tide of her mother’s sorrow. I fret at this, not because I am rushed, rather the patient needs an urgent outcome.

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Pandemic funerals: inside a mortuary during coronavirus – video

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The funeral industry has had to adapt to new regulations around death care during the pandemic at the same time as dealing with an increase in work. Poppy’s Funerals in south London is one provider that believes that public health concerns should not impact upon its ability to carry out its role with humanity and respect. The Guardian spent the day inside its mortuary to see how the firm and its staff have adapted to the new challenges they face


  • If you’ve been affected by bereavement during the pandemic, guidance and advice can be found here 
  • With thanks to Jeanne Rathbone and family
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Invisible deaths: from nursing homes to prisons, the coronavirus toll is out of sight – and out of mind?

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There are few images of the 86,000 deaths and many of the Covid-19 hotspots - prisons, nursing homes, meat packing plants - are off limits. What is the impact of this hidden toll?

John Delano was six years old when the contagion struck his neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut. There was a morgue just down the road. Coffins began spilling on to the sidewalk. It made the perfect stage for an exciting new game.

“We thought, ‘Boy, this is great,’” he recalled. “‘It’s like climbing the pyramids.’ Then one day, I slipped and broke my nose on one of the coffins. My mother was very upset. She said, didn’t I realize there were people in those boxes who had died?”

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We can’t be squeamish about death. We need to confront our worst fears

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Patients, their families and their doctors need to be open about the inevitable as the virus sweeps through our population
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As the coronavirus spreads through the British population, there is one fact we can all agree on. Whether we like it or not, society’s greatest taboo – death and dying – has been thrust unequivocally centre stage.

How could it not, when government strategy is to allow the virus to infect huge swathes of the country in the hope of building sufficient “herd immunity” to protect from future harm? The virus has killed an estimated 3.4% of those it has infected, according to the World Health Organization, although this figure is expected to decline as the true number of people infected becomes apparent. Herd immunity, according to Downing Street’s chief scientific adviser, requires a minimum infection rate of 60% of the population. Thus we may face a potential early and unexpected death toll of hundreds of thousands of Britons.

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When assisted dying means you have to go before you’re ready

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Grappling with Alzheimer’s, Leila Bell decided to end her life. She used her final days to call on Canada to change its rules

Leila Bell, an 85-year-old great grandmother in Vancouver, decided the circumstances of her death warranted one last act of advocacy.

She told a handful of close friends, her psychologist and her doctor about her plan. Her long-time confidante Sarah Townsend made the arrangements.

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Human composting could be the future of deathcare

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Washington becomes first US state to legalise practice as interest in green burials surges in UK

It is viewed as a fitting end for a banana skin or a handful of spent coffee grounds. But now people are being urged to consider human composting and other environmentally friendly “deathcare” options.

Speaking before a talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Seattle on Sunday, Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, a professor of soil science and sustainable agriculture at Washington State University, said: “Death certainly isn’t the biggest environmental impact we have in our life process. But we can still look for new alternatives.”

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When my husband died, mushroom foraging helped me out of the dark

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After losing all sense of hope and home, hunting in woodland with other mushroomers got me through my grief

I was a bright-eyed 18-year-old, just one month into an international study exchange in Stavanger in Norway when I met Eiolf. I stood next to him at a party and we spent the whole night talking. It helped that he was one of the few Norwegian students I met who could actually point to my home country of Malaysia on a map. After that night I’d hang around the library hoping to cross his path. Luckily, he had the same idea.

Eiolf was knowledgeable and read a lot, but he also had a goofy sense of humour. He was very kind, too, the sort of person who children and animals gravitate towards. I had assumed that at the end of my exchange I’d go back to Malaysia, but instead I relocated to Norway to be with him; it just felt right. Norway was very different to my homeland, but I settled there and enjoyed a fulfilling career as an anthropologist, while Eiolf became an architect. We were together for 32 years, and I never lost that sense of joy in our relationship. He made me a better version of myself.

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Die Tomorrow review – dates with death ripped from the headlines

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This ruminative collection of vignettes steeped in everyday reality was inspired by newspaper accounts of bizarre tragedies

Not a Bond film. In Damien Hirst’s celebrated creation, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living was a tiger shark suspended in a tank. In this brief, ruminative piece from Thai film-maker Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, that impossibility is something else – it’s the formaldehyde that the shark’s floating in, or that we’re all floating in, or it’s the banal glass tank itself, or it’s the people milling around the artwork in the gallery, peering at it, shrugging, and then leaving to get on with their day.

This feature is a collection of short stories or realist vignettes, based on or otherwise inspired by newspaper stories about tragic or bizarre deaths. A story about a female student killed by a truck that careered off the road – a woman who, just a few moments before, had been hanging out with her friends in a hotel room and had volunteered to step out to get beer – is dramatised with a simple scene showing the ordinary, undramatic, untragic hanging out: chatting, laughing. Later, a maid silently comes to clean the empty room.

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A greener way to go: what’s the most eco-friendly way to dispose of a body?

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Burial uses too much land; cremation releases too much CO2. So what about composting our loved ones – or even dissolving them?

In the middle of a cavernous factory floor in Pudsey, Leeds, sits a gleaming steel cylinder. One day, its maker believes, most of us will end up in something similar.

The machine is a Resomator – a pressurised canister in which corpses are submerged in a mixture of 150C water and potassium hydroxide solution for three to four hours until the flesh is dissolved, leaving behind only soft, greyish bones. After drying in an adjacent oven, these are ground down into paper-white powder, while the fluid is sent to a water treatment plant for disposal. The entire process is operated by a touchscreen and a single “start” button, away from the view of mourners. Ashes to ashes no more.

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Suzanne Moore on Nick Cave: ‘Rarely have I heard someone express grief so well’

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The musician’s latest show, in which he sings, takes questions and talks about losing his son, left our writer astonished

‘Freewheeling adventures in intimacy where anything can happen.” So say the words on the seat as we wait for Nick Cave to come on stage and sit in it. Who could resist? The man is here to play songs but also to answer questions. “You can ask me anything,” he promises on his Red Hand Files website, which offers one-to-one correspondence with fans. “There will be no moderator. This will be between you and me. Let’s see what happens.”

The resulting tour is “a work in progress” that has grown from the blog, which had become a series of love letters, meditations on loss, and poetry. Cave is “acting on the intuition that something of value” can come from doing it live. He was worried about something he wrote: that social media undermines “both nuance and connectivity”. Here he is trying to deepen the connection, a word he returns to again and again. He comes on suited and booted, immaculate, the knowing elder statesman, the ex-junkie, the writer of murder ballads and the tenderest love songs, the storm-bringer who will somehow shelter us and reassure us that there can be, in that quaint old-fashioned way, “a dialogue”.

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Dioramas of death: cleaner recreates rooms where people died alone

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Miyu Kojima creates miniature scenes based on Tokyo apartments her company has cleaned after solitary deaths

Warning: this article contains images some people may find distressing

It was at a trade show for the funeral industry that Miyu Kojima had what might seem at first like a macabre idea.

Kojima, 27, works for To-Do Company, a cleaning firm that specialises in the apartments of the recently deceased. Many of their jobs involve kodokushi (“solitary deaths”), where people die alone and are not found for days, a phenomenon that has recently gripped the Japanese imagination.

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Belgium investigates right-to-die group offering ‘suicide powder’

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Last Will provides advice to members on how to obtain lethal drug to end their lives

Belgian prosecutors are to investigate a right-to-die group that has been offering advice on the use of a “suicide powder”.

The Last Will group, which has about 23,000 paying members with an average age of 69, was blocked by the Dutch authorities last year from helping approximately 1,000 people purchase the lethal drug but continues to offer advice on legal ways to obtain it.

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Eco-friendly ending: Washington state is first to allow human composting

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Legislation would let facilities offer ‘natural organic reduction’ which turns a body into about two wheelbarrows’ worth of soil

Ashes to ashes, guts to dirt.

Governor Jay Inslee signed legislation Tuesday making Washington the first state to approve composting as an alternative to burying or cremating human remains.

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Welcome to the Departure Lounge. Destination: death

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An innovative project backed by the Wellcome Trust aims to help people come to terms with their mortality

Images of sandy beaches, sun-kissed swimming pools and azure blue skies gleam from the window and walls of what appears to be a new travel agent opening in a London shopping centre. But browsers may be surprised by the destination, for it is a journey every one of us will one day take: death.

Look more closely at the posters and it becomes clear that the words are all about “passing away” (half of British adults prefer to avoid the word “death”, apparently). The Departure Lounge, in Lewisham, south London, is the brainchild of the Academy of Medical Sciences, whose mission is to promote biomedical and health research. Death, it turns out, is one of the most under-researched areas in healthcare, accounting for less than half of 1% of money spent.

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Hong Kong real estate now more expensive for the dead than the living

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A tiny nook for an urn can cost up to £180,000. With 200,000 sets of ashes waiting for a resting place, the city is running out of options

“Per square foot, it has become more expensive to house the dead than the living,” says Kwok Hoi Pong, chairman of the Hong Kong Funeral Business Association. “A niche for an urn in a private columbarium in the best position can cost up to HK$1.8m. This is the phenomenon in Hong Kong.”

A ground burial plot can cost anywhere between HK$3m (£300,000) and HK$5m, but in the city’s congested cemeteries, vacancies rarely become available. Land is so scarce that 90% of the 48,000 people a year who die in Hong Kong are cremated. But increasingly finding the space even to store ashes is becoming nigh on impossible.

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It took more than a decade to explain the sudden death of my precious teenage son | Karen Gardner

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Although I wasn’t aware of feeling responsible, the lifting of a sense of heavy burden indicates otherwise

Sitting in the cardiologist’s rooms, awaiting the results of a genetic test that might explain the sudden death of my eldest child, I could not then have imagined the impact on my world of what was to come.

It’s 14 years since Tom died one sunny summer day, but my quest to find a plausible explanation never subsided and I never got used to not knowing why, as I had to get used to living without him.

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