Theos’s report Love, Grief, and Hope: Emotional responses to death and dying in the UK features in the Daily Mail. 28/11/2023

My mother died ten years ago, and when I think about the exhausting, grief–drenched days that followed, the clearest memory I have is sitting in a small country church sobbing through the singing of Dido’s Lament by Henry Purcell.

The service was cathartic. It brought everything I felt about her to the surface and for the first time since her death ten days earlier, I was able to acknowledge my grief. For me, my brother and younger half–sisters, that funeral provided the crucial emotional framework that kept us sane in the first shock of her death.

Funerals are, in this world of tweakments and youth obsession, a necessary reminder that we too are mortal. We all need to acknowledge that there is shadow as well as sunshine, dark as well as light. Our modern reluctance to have funerals is connected to a profound squeamishness about death, but are we doing ourselves any favours by pretending we are not all headed in the same direction?

Just as we write a will to make our descendants’ lives easier when the time comes, so we must tell them to hold a funeral for us. Tell them it’s the best way to confront that maelstrom of emotion, to give the end of a life its proper significance, and to remember how very lucky they are still to be alive.

Love, Grief, and Hope: Emotional responses to death and dying in the UK, published earlier today, examines emotional responses to death and dying in the UK, presenting the findings of a nationally representative poll commissioned by Theos and conducted by YouGov.

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