I hadn’t given my coffin much thought until last Saturday, when I attended the South Bank Centre’s ‘Festival for the Living’. The main exhibit was a selection of coffins from Ghana. They were bizarre: a skip, a mini Mercedes and a giant cream cake. It was an absurd sight. I found myself playing Loyd Grossman in a macabre version of David Frost’s Through the Keyhole: ‘Who’s buried in a coffin like this? David, it’s over to you.’
The coffins were a wonderful distraction, but the show wasn’t about death — not as such. The ‘Festival for the Living’ concerned those who are left to grieve; and there were two literary events that confronted grief directly. Meghan O’Rourke spoke of The Long Goodbye, her memoir of mother’s death from cancer aged 55; and Christopher Reid read from and discussed his poetry collection A Scattering, written after his wife’s premature death.
O’Rourke’s book sounds not wholly dissimilar to Joan Didion’s more famous, The
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