05/08/2026
I wasn't always comfortable with death - far from it! In fact, the thought of being anywhere near a dead body scared the life out of me!
My first experience of death was my maternal grandmother. She was just 52 years old when she died very suddenly. I was only seven at the time, and seeing her after she had died was a terrifying experience that left me with nightmares.
For many, many years afterwards, death was something I feared. I can still hear my mum reassuring me, "It's not the dead you have to worry about; it's the living!" I knew that to be true, but it was still something I remained afraid of, rather than understood.
When my paternal grandmother died, I was 26 and had already experienced the deaths of both of my grandfathers. Their deaths were sad, but they were expected rather than sudden. Those experiences exposed me to different circumstances and gave me healthy exposure to the natural process of dying.
Looking back, the contrast between my grandmothers' deaths, happening at different stages of my life, and under very different circumstances, showed me how our age, experience, and our first introduction to death can shape our ongoing relationship with it.
The experiences we have, especially in childhood, can influence how we view death for years to come, but they don't have to define that relationship forever - I’m the living proof!
