The Victorians, as the comedian Cariad Lloyd points out in her touching new book, were deadly serious about death. Bereaved families tied black bows to their doors. People wore armbands and veils after losing a loved one – a public show of internal pain. And memento mori – including photographs of corpses – were hung in homes as gruesome reminders that we all die. There’s a theory that the first world war shattered these customs – the loss was too monumental and so the culture around dying became much more private, cloistered, lonely.
Perhaps, writes Lloyd, that’s why we’re often so ill-prepared when loved ones die: we’ve lost touch with time-honoured ways of working through grief, both collectively and individually. To her credit, she is doing her bit to try to change that. Having lost her father to cancer when she was 15, she’s spent years grappling with her sorrow (“a huge, swirling, tangled ball of wires – like the worst headphone knot you have ever seen”).
