As the old saying goes, life’s only certainties are death and taxes. So why do we avoid and delay planning for death? Granted, three times more Wills were written in 2020 than any other year, peaking when Boris Johnson was admitted to ICU. But when news of the vaccine broke,...
death
I was making Sunday roast when my sister rang me, unexpectedly, the day after winter solstice 2019. I could hear that her heart was in her throat and I knew instinctively that death had visited our family.
I assumed my sister was ringing to tell me that her partner had...
A lifetime of making documentaries has convinced award-winning filmmaker Kirsten Johnson of the power of the real. But now she’s ready to use every escapist movie-making trick in the book – staging inventive and fantastical ways for her 86-year-old psychiatrist father to die...
Cinema’s longstanding fascination with America’s death row has produced numerous masterpieces, including Dead Man Walking and The Green Mile. Lauded for their moving depictions of injustice and redemption, whether based on real life, as in the former, or a...
The United Kingdom is currently set to see the highest number of deaths from Covid-19 in Europe and the second highest number in the world after the USA. At the time of writing, in May, we have already seen almost 60,000 excess deaths across the four nations during the Covid...
In the recess of their personal thoughts, every person at some time in their life muses on a question: Is death really the end? If not, what comes after? I must admit – it feels like a confession – that my sense is that death is a portal into some other kind of conscious...
There is nothing more certain in life than death; we just don’t know how or when it will happen. When my dad died when I was 20 years-old, no one spoke about him again, perhaps scared of the upset speaking his name may cause. My mum died a few years later, followed by my...
We've trawled through years of our archive to bring together content on death from The Psychologist and our Research Digest.
Bereavement and grief
A collection of articles on bereavement and...
Some resources on the psychology of bereavement and grief from The Psychologist and Research Digest...
Grief in Covid times - Ella Rhodes...
There is a window. Whenever I walk past that window, it reminds me of all the deaths that have been part of my life. Of a best friend at the age of 14, of the floormate in uni halls in London who was found dead in her room. Of a classmate who died all of a sudden. Of my uncle...