Today my 82 year old mother contemplated her life. “Everything is in the past,” she said, “I don’t want to book anything for years in the future.” I asked her what she meant. “Well, in 2030 I’m not going to be here.”

“I doubt if anyone’s forward planning is done that far in advance,” I responded, adding a reassuring, “but how do you know you won’t still be alive in 2030?”

These days my mother often talks in terms of “people my age”, and the fact that her generation is dying out. Yet we can learn to value our lives more by appreciating that we are only here for a limited amount of time.  Experiences of bereavement can help us appreciate life in the context of our finite existence. In fact, funerals are not just a celebration of life for the person who has died, they are also an occasion to consider how we would like to be remembered.

how rich is your legacy?

What is the purpose of life? Despite huge increases in relative wealth and life expectancy in recent decades, we do not appear to be significantly happier than before. Yes, we have more money to spend accumulating material stuff, and more leisure time to spend on holidays and fun experiences, but to what end? Perhaps just to keep up with everyone else, who is doing exactly the same? What is our end goal in life; what is it all for? Do we want to be remembered for the car we owned, or the most expensive hotel we stayed in, or for having the most friends on Facebook?

You may or may not recall the case of Joyce Vincent, the 40 year old, who worked for the advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi. In January 2006, her skeleton was found in the north London bedsit where she had died more than two years before. The skeleton was clutching a shopping bag and was surrounded by Christmas presents she had wrapped but failed to deliver. Her television and heating were still on. The housing officers who found her had come to repossess her flat because the rent was thousands of pounds in arrears. There were no suspicious circumstances surrounding her death, but where were Joyce’s family, friends, workmates, or neighbours?

Why do we expect to live forever?

In the West, death has become a taboo subject. We expect to live long lives – and some even believe they have a chance of immortality. Why when we are all born to die, do we spend so much time and effort trying to preserve our lives?

People go to extreme lengths to preserve their looks. Some, (such as Bryan Johnson), resort to potentially harmful treatments like blood plasma exchange, or human growth hormone therapy; or they become addicted to plastic surgery.  It is human to wish to be as youthful as possible for as long as possible, although there is currently no prize for the best-preserved corpse in the graveyard.

Others go a step further and pay fortunes to freeze their bodies after they die. Suspended animation and cryonics are two of the methods used to preserve bodies until they can be reanimated. In some cases just the head is preserved in liquid nitrogen, as it is anticipated that it will be possible to eventually grow a body from the head. You will need deep pockets to do this, and you’ll probably want to bequeath your wealth to yourself. Don Laughlin, a casino owner from Nevada, left his preserved remains $5 million in order to have “a better chance of coming back.”

The possibility of being able to grow body parts to replace existing ones when they are worn out has got some predicting that people already alive today will live to be 500 or even 1000 years old. We are already employing techniques such as PDG (preimplantation genetic diagnosis) to screen embryos for diseases so that designer babies can be born with disease resistant genes. Even if  - as unlikely as it seems - it does become possible to live to 1000, we are all still eventually going to die.

In his book, Being Mortal, surgeon Atul Gawande, describes how we have become unsure about what the word ‘dying’ means: “In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die.”

In the West, it has become uncommon for people to die before middle age (currently deemed to be around 60 years of age). We now spend a longer time living than we do dying. So it is considered to be a tragedy if, say, a child or a teenager, or anyone under the age of 60 dies.

And when someone over 60 dies, it still comes as a surprise, even if that person is old and sick. Not surprisingly, care for the terminally ill has come to be known as ‘palliative’ care – derived from the Latin word ‘to cloak’ or ‘to shield.’ Scientists don’t even study death. The moment of death is considered to be sacred - a rare spiritual occurrence, as opposed to a basic fact of life.

The fact that we are unable to contemplate the end of life, combined with the media’s obsession with disasters leads to the sensationalisation of death. This is magnified when a celebrity dies at a relatively young age.

Princess Diana’s funeral marked a turning point in the way that the feelings of mourners were openly expressed and displayed in the UK. Unlike the ritual wailing of mourners in some parts of the world, we have hitherto been expected to maintain a stiff upper lip; as if not showing our emotions will somehow preserve the dignity of the person who has died. And talking to someone who has recently suffered a bereavement seems somehow a little embarrassing. What do we say? Should we send them a card? Or perhaps an email?

It is curious that we are unsure how to respond to what is the only certainty in life.

Why do we never confront death until it actually happens?

There are books to help children come to terms with impending death, or the death of parent, or pet  - with titles like Goodbye Mousie and When Dinosaurs Die. But there are few such books for adults. These mostly focus on the grief caused by the loss of a loved one.

As adults, we tend not to consider our own death, unless we are told we are terminally ill. In which case, nowadays, there is the added choice of opting for assisted dying. With modern pain control, this may seem unnecessary. Perhaps it is an efficient way of handling a situation that is fundamentally alien to us? We worry about the quality of death experienced by our pets, and even by animals we consume the meat of,  but rarely do we consider our own end.

In a world with such an ageing population, it seems strange that we rarely ever talk about the process of death, or the spiritual questions it raises, even in places of religious worship. Death is somehow denied and swept under the carpet. All manner of synonyms are used instead – we ‘pass over', ‘pass away’, ‘become deceased’, but rarely do we mention that someone died or is dead. Why not?

In an amusing memoir called My Life in the Middle Ages, New Yorker, James Atlas, describes how the “passing” of friends turns his address book into a “necropolis.” He claims that getting into a cemetery is going to be as competitive as getting into a private school. And that’s something worth considering, as fresh cemetery space is becoming harder to find. In the UK, around 60% of burials are now in existing graves.

Not only do we not want to allow death to be a part of our life, but we don’t feel the need to cater for it either. People tend to steer clear of cemeteries, generally associating them with sadness and loss. It’s vastly different from Victorian times when death was commemorated with huge funeral processions, ornate headstones, ornamental urns and elaborate mourning rituals.  A funeral is rarely talked about until the person you need to talk to about it has died.

Most people are too busy bringing up their families and working to pay for their living to put their life into context. They tend not to think about how they would like to be remembered, who they would like to conduct their funeral service, or what they would like to leave behind as a legacy - until it is too late.

Experiences of bereavement can be a wake up call

My mother explained how as we get older, time goes faster.  But on many occasions she’s told me how much slower she is getting at walking round the golf course, and how much she aches when she gets out of bed.  She attends funerals quite often nowadays, which may seem quite a depressing thought to many of us. But funerals are a time to reflect, not upon death, but on life.

This is what I discovered when I interviewed people in the UK and in Zambia about their experiences of bereavement for a book I wrote in 2006. The act of being able to celebrate someone’s life and give them a proper farewell was universally deemed to be not just meaningful, but also part of a healing process.  In most cases, this motivated the bereaved to consider how they would like to be remembered, and in some cases to even plan their own funerals. Of course, mortality is more apparent somewhere like Zambia, where AIDS and malaria are the two most likely causes of death. People who are more aware of their mortality seem more philosophical about death. However, after the COVID pandemic, we all have a greater sense of our mortality.

death and remembrance

Thinking about death can put life into perspective and help give meaning to our existence.  This is why near death experiences can be so transformational. And why those living in parts of the world with a higher mortality rate than ours are often happier with their lot than we are. Reflecting on our mortality can give value to life that, for some, has lost its meaning.

I’m not suggesting that we should live every moment as if it is our last, but that we should consider the implications of how we spend our time, our approach to life, and what our legacy will offer to future generations. We can think about life as being a story. And every story has an ending.

To conclude, I would like to ask the following questions.

How old are you?

How much longer do you think you have to live?

How would you most like to spend your remaining time?

What will your death mean to others?

How would you like to be remembered?