I am director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, one of the world’s only research centres dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of death, dying and the dead body. My younger sister, Julie, and I spent hours and hours of our youth in the different funeral homes Dad worked in. Our parents had made a point of not hiding anything about death, funerals or dead bodies when we were kids. Despite my lived experience and academic credentials on human mortality, I was completely unprepared for Julie’s untimely death at the age of 43. I was not unprepared in that way many people are wholly unprepared for a person to die.

Source: The Guardian March 24, 2020 06:00 UTC