Avoiding conversations about death doesn’t help us when we’re faced with the reality

Many of us struggle with language around loss, choosing to avoid the topic altogether, writes Harriet Williamson

In the UK alone, more than 165,000 people have lost their lives to Covid (PA)

Where living things are, death follows,” Hayley Campbell wrote for Voices last Thursday.

Campbell is the author of All the Living and the Dead: A Personal Investigation into the Death Trade, and she eloquently explores our discomfort around addressing the subject of death, highlighting how we are so desperate not to “bring the mood down” that there’s never really a “good” time to talk about this absolute inevitability.

At the weekend, Aisha Rimi wrote about attending the funeral of her grandmother in Nigeria, via a WhatsApp video call. This bereavement occurred during lockdown, and Rimi and her sisters stayed in the UK, feeling left out of the grieving process due to geographical distance.