Death

I’ve never understood the phrase ‘died peacefully’. Two weeks ago I watched my mother die, in the very same NHS hospital where I watched my father die almost ten years earlier. There was nothing peaceful about it, at least from my unwanted ringside seat. The end — acute pneumonia providing the final nail in a soon-to-be purchased coffin — was painfully slow. It dragged on and on and on. She struggled for her last breaths and appeared distressed, confused and frightened to the end. The last time I had been to St Helier hospital in south London was September 2005, as my father slowly slipped away. Naturally the memories came

I had only experienced great loss when my mother died. It was desperately harrowing, but not as harrowing as the news that my sister Jackie had passed away. My mother had suffered a long lingering illness but Jackie only told me about her cancer two weeks before she died. It was a shattering, heart-breaking blow that I still haven’t assimilated and I don’t know if I ever will really get over it. I expect one learns to live with loss but she remains as vivid in my heart and my mind as if she were still alive. Jackie was a special woman, not because she was my sister but because

Not content with Facebooking our every foible, Instagramming the births of our children and live-tweeting our daily lives, more and more of us are now making a public spectacle of dying. We’re inviting strangers not merely to ‘like’ expertly filtered photos of our breakfasts, but to admire the way we peg out. Nothing better captures the death of privacy than this publicisation of death. It began with the literary set. It’s a rare writer these days diagnosed with a terminal illness who doesn’t get a book out of it. Jenny Diski is the latest public dyer. She’s giving readers of the London Review of Books a blow-by-blow account of her death

The name says it all. ‘Dying Without Dignity’ is the parliamentary health ombudsman’s report into over 300 complaints of the neglect of terminally ill patients by the NHS. The BBC this morning highlights two horrible examples. One mother had to call an A&E doctor to come and give her son more pain relief because staff on the palliative care ward he had been on had failed to respond to her requests. A 67-year-old man’s family learned of his terminal cancer diagnosis through a hospital note – before he knew himself. This ‘failed every principle of established good practice in breaking bad news’, says the report. Julie Mellor, the ombudsman, uses uncompromising language: ‘Our investigations have found

They say that death and taxes are the only two certainties in life. But there seems to be a third, linked to death and as painful as taxes. It’s the astronomical cost of organising a funeral. My partner’s father died recently, and for the honour of a bog-standard cremation in a far from fashionable part of East Anglia she was charged just over £4,000. Jo felt no shame in asking for the cheapest option (it’s what her father would have wanted — he was never a man to waste money), and so the answer came as something of a shock. When a figure has you imagining the cheeky little jaunt to