Why I feel like an expert in DEATH

Christina Patterson has suffered many losses and dealt with all the life admin that comes with it

At my mother's interment, my brother gave a eulogy by the grave. 'Mum and Dad bought this plot on my 24th birthday,' he said. 'But it only came with a 50-year lease. So if I manage to survive to the age of 74, I hope I have enough savings left to buy an extension!' In spite of my sadness, I smiled. It was just like Tom to try to lighten the mood. He was 55 and I was 53 and 74 seemed a long way off. Two and a half years later, I was standing by the grave again and Tom was in it.

'Dying,' says the poet Sylvia Plath in her poem Lady Lazarus 'is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.' I have thought of that poem quite a lot in the last few years. I am, of course, no expert in the act of dying. I've had cancer twice and done my very best to keep myself alive. But after burying both my parents and both my siblings, I'm beginning to feel like a bit of an expert in death.

The first funeral I ever went to was my sister's. My father phoned me at work to tell me that Caroline had collapsed while she was washing up. The paramedics, he said, had done their best. I was 36 when Caroline died at 41. Tom was 38. I had no idea how to arrange a funeral or register a death and I had no idea how you were meant to do any of this when your world had just been blown apart.

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