Everybody Knows Everybody Dies

Death. One of the many taboo topics we as a society have decided we don't want to talk about until it comes close to home, and even then we still avoid the myriad of conversations around it, because let's face it, when someone dies, the death is just the beginning.

It is a difficult subject to bring up regardless of when it's brought up, but I would argue we are doing ourselves a disservice when we use the difficulty as an excuse not to talk about it, because it is one of the very few things literally everyone who was ever born will experience. It is as inevitable as breathing, yet even acknowledging it is typically framed as a bad omen, like the very act of talking about it is in itself an invitation. And what if it is? As River Song once said, "Everybody knows that everybody dies". Wouldn't it be better to be prepared?

This fear of death, this reluctance to even speak its name, isn't unique to any one culture, but there is a particular habit that has taken root in modern life: the habit of postponement. We have quietly agreed, without ever saying so out loud, that death is something to be dealt with when it becomes unavoidable. A problem for future you. We tend to think of mortality as something to reckon with in old age, a conversation we'll get to eventually. But not everyone gets eventually. And even those who do rarely find that the timing makes it easier to face. The work of softening death's blow doesn't happen automatically when the moment comes. It happens in the quiet long before it.

And yet most of us spend that quiet time on anything but this.

A friend of mine recently attended a funeral for someone in his forties, gone without warning from a brain aneurysm, survived by his partner and children, who are now left to continue on without him. This isn't a rare story. Death doesn't consult a calendar or wait until the moment feels appropriate. It arrives when it arrives, and for every person in that congregation who thought "that could have been me," the question worth sitting with is: if it had been, would the people relying on you have been okay? Not emotionally, that pain is unavoidable, but practically. Would they have known what you wanted? Would they have been protected? The uncomfortable truth is that preparation isn't something we do for ourselves. It is something we do for the people who will still be here when we are not.

There are things we can do, while we are still here, to ensure that when death comes the people we leave behind aren't immediately scrambling to hold things together on top of their grief. Three of them are worth naming plainly: saving or investing toward funeral costs, a life insurance policy, and a will. None require wealth to begin with. None require a lawyer or a financial advisor for the first conversation. They require only a decision to start.

A life insurance policy is perhaps the most immediate act of care on the list. If you are the main or sole earner in your household, your death doesn't just take you, it takes the income your family relies on. A policy changes that. It means the people who loved you aren't forced to grieve and financially survive at the same time. If the cost of living makes saving feel impossible right now, life insurance is the one worth prioritising, because its entire purpose is to stand in for the things you couldn't leave behind.

A will is often assumed to be the domain of the wealthy, something you sort out once you have property and assets worth dividing. That assumption is worth challenging. A will is less about what you have and more about what happens to it, and to the people connected to it, when you are no longer there to say. Without one, those decisions get made by law rather than by you. Families have fractured over estates far smaller than anyone expected, not because of greed, but because grief and ambiguity in the same room is a difficult combination.

None of this is a one-time conversation. It is the kind of thing worth revisiting every few years, as circumstances change, as families grow, as policies lapse or provisions become outdated. The point is not to have it perfectly sorted. The point is to have it started.

The funeral sector steps in at the worst possible moment: the buyer is grieving, the clock is running, and every decision feels like a test of love. That combination makes it one of the few industries where the emotional state of the buyer is, in effect, part of the business model. A fully attended cremation funeral in the UK will typically cost somewhere between £3,500 and £4,500 once all fees are accounted for, and that figure has risen consistently faster than general inflation for years. None of this is to say the industry is entirely without conscience, but it is to say that grief is an extraordinarily poor condition in which to be making financial decisions. The people who fare best are the ones who made at least some of those decisions before they needed to. Not because they were morbid, but because they understood that planning ahead is an act of care for the people they love.

On a personal note, my parents are both over sixty and while they are still very much physically healthy, their mortality is something that sits quietly on my mind, and part of the reason I wrote this is because having that conversation with them is, I will admit, easier said than done. We did briefly end up having it, partly because writing this took considerably longer than I originally planned, and they certainly have some idea of how they want to retire and prepare for what comes eventually. But I won't pretend I was entirely satisfied with how it went. It still felt abstract, a conversation about a future neither of us wanted to make too real. So it will be a conversation to come back to, and revisit, and sit with more honestly than we managed this time.

There are questions I haven't fully formed yet. What I wish I had asked. What I'm afraid to find out. What I hope to understand the next time we sit down to have it. Maybe the answers aren't the point. Maybe the point is just to keep returning to the conversation, honestly and without flinching, before the choice to do so is no longer ours to make.

Hopefully not too late.