Man has conquered his inhibitions to talk about everything other than his own demise. Death is, famously, the last taboo — and, judging by many of the reviews of Philip Gould’s When I Die: Lessons from the Death Zone, we are no closer to breaking it.
The novelist Justin Cartwright describes himself as ‘racked with doubt’ about the correct response of the reviewer of a book that charts a man’s preparations for death from oesophageal cancer. He goes on to ask seven questions on that theme and gets no closer to an answer.
Meanwhile, the author Richard Holloway admits (£) to being ‘disturbed by the desperation with which we have become a culture that will do almost anything to keep death at bay.’ This is an odd sentence. Life and death are not cultural; they are personal.
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