Sarah Carey

And in fact, when I wrote that, someone got in touch with me and they said they had discovered the same thing was happening with the parent.

The parent was dying and the doctor had decided not to tell them.

Now, doctors will say they can tell when a patient doesn't want to know.

They know some patients can take it and they know some patients just don't want to know.

But it's a pretty disempowering thing to do, I think.

And oh, yeah.

And then the other one was that public versus private grief.

So, you know, up to World War One, as I was saying, you know, there were very strict rules around mourning.

You know, you wore black for such amount of time.

You weren't sent cards.

You weren't expected to send Christmas cards.

You weren't expected to go places like it was pretty ruthless.

And apparently the big change came during World War I when there were so many deaths, like all of Britain would have been in mourning for years.

And a kind of culture change came that actually you should be kind of proud of the heroic war death.

And it was unseemly to get involved in all this grief.

And of course, any of the Spanish flu afterwards as well, and the millions that died in that.

So it was this shift from the public sphere that it was something that you were expected to deal with privately.

and not impose it on everybody else, that somehow you'd know right to do that.

And then of course, as death shifted from the home into the hospital, even the process of death became more institutionalized and clinical.

So the more distance we put between ourselves and death, and then the opportunity to publicly mourn, I think now we've ended up in a position, and you might come up against this now, where you're allowed kind of a certain amount of time where you can wallow