I’m one of those people who shouldn’t really be here. When I was 18 months old I came down with a serious illness that came very close to killing me (born in 1964, the illness got me in 1965). My skin became covered in black blisters, like I’d been napalmed. The doctors didn’t know what it was, and for want of any better ideas they put me in the tropical disease unit of Guys Hospital. I was in that unit for six weeks and was given the Last Rites on two occasions. My mother, who was a young woman at the time, couldn’t handle it, and it was my dear grandmother who sat beside me as I hovered between life and death.
Some of you may have heard this story before, and I’m mentioning it in relation to the covid stuff: people don’t seem to understand what death is anymore; it’s all been sanitised.
I come from a large, extended working class family in London. Death is a ritual that usually involves a Wake (think about that term) which involves the deceased coming back to their home for a few days before burial. The deceased is presented in a coffin, while the relatives all get pissed-up and squabble about the money.
My grandfather’s funeral (back in the 1980s) was a classic of the genre. The hearse stopped at a bookmakers on the Old Kent Road, for grandfather to put his last bet on. Then the funeral procession stopped at one or two pubs before they closed (back then there was no all day opening). By the time we got to the cemetery everyone was totally rat arsed. As they lowered grandfather’s coffin into the grave my grandmother was overcome with emotion (ie, very drunk on Guiness) and started swaying. Luckily one of my aunts was standing beside grandmother and managed to grab her before she toppled into the grave.
This is just the short version of that funeral; and I could anecdote about many other family funerals.
The point of course is that death is just as much a part of life as birth, and everything inbetween.