Letters: How to face death

Be prepared

Sir: The advice of Jeremy Clarke’s Aunty Margaret that he ‘must “get right with the Lord” as a matter of the gravest urgency’ in the light of his cancer diagnosis is spot on. I say that not just because I’m a vicar, but because I have sat at innumerable bedsides of people in the last days of their lives and have often found myself thinking: ‘You really should have prepared for this a long time ago.’ But by then they were too sick, too tired or too drugged up to think straight about spiritual matters and I have always felt that I would be intruding if I forced the issue. Deathbed conversions such as Lord Marchmain’s in Brideshead Revisited are, in my experience, almost nonexistent. We would all do well to heed Aunty Margaret’s advice and prepare for death ‘as a matter of gravest urgency’.

The Revd Richard Coombs

Rector of Cheltenham

Why the bishops belong

Sir: You are entirely justified in drawing attention to the selective nature of the moral outrage expressed by the current Church of England bishops with regard to the government’s immigration policy (‘The deportation debacle’, 18 June).