You'd think we'd have it down to a fine art.
Fifty thousand Scottish families are affected by it every year. We read about it daily in newspapers or see it on the television. After all, it's something we'll all experience sooner or later. And yet we are such amateurs when it comes to dealing with its aftermath.
I'm talking about death and bereavement. Lynda Bellingham is the latest well-known figure to go. Only two weeks ago she sounded so full of life in her interview with Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour. Where has all that energy gone? And what happens to those she has left behind? How will they cope?
Bellingham asked for a great big London party to mark her passing. She clearly wanted to be remembered for the sparkling person we saw her to be. "Grasp it all" was her parting message. "Enjoy the bits you can and tell your family you love them while you have the chance."
Good advice. But what about her family? What about all the bereaved who are left, those walking wounded? Does our society help them cope? Could we do it better? Or should I say could we do it worse? When a family member dies our statutory entitlement to paid leave is for just three days, one of which must include the funeral.
It is inhumane, probably inhuman. We're allowed a decent period of paid leave for pregnancy and birth. Why not death?
Robert Peston, the BBC's economics editor, was widowed just over two years ago. He wrote yesterday: "I still ache, sometimes acutely."
He receives a "torrent of letters and emails" when he writes about his grief. Bereaved people feel isolated by their pain and misunderstood. They are expected to get on with life. They feel their continued suffering is self-indulgent; that they are weird.
But in an article in The Times, Peston admits: "I didn't initially realise how much time and space I would need to acquire a new equilibrium of sorts and accept what happened. For what it's worth I am not there yet."
There's a modern trend I've noticed. People are encouraged to find "closure".What does "closure" mean? Are we to believe that the loss of a husband or wife, parent, sibling or child, can be wrapped up and tidied away? The loss of a loved family member is talked of as a wound that can be healed when it is, for many, an amputation. The limb has gone. The pain remains.
Last month Acas, the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service, published a bereavement best-practice guide for employers. It suggests offering empathy, respecting individual responses, understanding there may be a delayed reaction and being open to the notion of flexible working where a family needs it. I find it shocking that any such guide should be necessary in the 21st century.
Death is hardly new. Bereavement has been among us since before we climbed down from the trees. We are so clever and so sophisticated that developing technologies will, within a decade, allow us to send avatars to meetings instead of attending them in person. And we still don't know how to help our colleagues or neighbours through grief.
There have been eras when we acknowledged death better, perhaps even wallowed in it. Think of the Victorian fashion for plumed horses to pull a hearse, mourning dress, and jewellery fashioned from locks of hair. I think of cultures where ceremonies are held one month and then one year following a death. They bring the chief mourners back together and remind the community of their loss. I think of the Scottish islands where members of communities take a turn at carrying the coffin.
Nowadays, most of us queue outside a crematorium before a funeral, down a few drams after it and carry on as normal.
It's only when the family members delve into their work contract that they discover how much time they can take off work. According to the Employment Rights Act, they can have those three paltry days with pay and a "reasonable period of unpaid absence". How reasonable that turns out to be depends on the discretion of the employer. In the past five years one-third of those bereaved felt they were not treated with compassion. People find they have to use sick leave or holiday entitlement.
It's a knotty problem. How can anyone measure the grief of another? Peston was fortunate in that the BBC offered compassionate leave. Also, his job can sometimes be done from home. It helped him adjust to single parenthood.
Peston accuses us of forgetting how debilitating grief can be, admitting that, until he was widowed, he was "probably as insensitive and uncomprehending about its frightening power as anyone".
The writer Julian Barnes was also floored by grief after his wife, Pat Kavanagh, died in 2008. In his book Levels of Life, published last year, he quotes EM Forster saying, "one grief throws no light upon another".
Barnes recounts how some friends suggested he get away while others asked if he had found someone else. When he mentioned his wife's name, some failed to pick it up and speak about her.
He was in the depths of misery, prickly, fault-finding and his suffering persisted. With Barnes, as with Preston, the depth of their love seems matched by the depth of their pain.
Can such individual experience be legislated for? Oddly, I think it can. Not everyone is so loved, certainly. But few are so little cared for that their closest relations can return to normal working mode in three days. (I've known people mourn their pets for longer than that.)
Also, death is expensive. Funerals come with a hefty price tag. New babysitting or caring arrangements may have to be made. Property may need turned out or sold. It takes more than three days, especially when feeling bereft. Isn't it downright punitive to remove someone's income after three days when they are at so low an ebb?
That's also harshest on the poorest. Is their grief worth less?
The usual cry will go up about small firms being unable to take the strain. Well, why not think along the lines outlined by the controversial Lord Freud? Where a firm is too small to afford the cost, let the state subsidise all or part of the payment. A year is not required but a month sounds reasonable.
Not everyone will want it. Some people put themselves to rights by getting stuck into work. I am like that. The last thing I would want is empty time. Once the rituals were over, the family dispersed, I'd be beating down the office door. It's not a cure but for me it is a way of staying sane.
Every grief is different and every person has to find their own way through. To help them on their way, in the early days, the least our rich society can do is to give them a little financial ballast and a decent time to mourn. We may no longer be a community that carries the coffin, but surely we can do better to support the living.
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