Peter Hitchens comments on findings from new Theos report ‘Love, Grief and Hope’ in Daily Mail column. 02/12/2023

In Alan Bennett’s best play, Forty Years On, he sums up modern Britain in two bleak sentences. It is a country where ‘a butterfly is an event’ and where ‘death is a telephone call from the doctor’.

As we live our lives more frantically and intensely, and more individually, we find death not so much frightening as unthinkable. We don’t want to think about the deaths of those we love, or of our own. And a survey by the think–tank Theos last week found that, among other things, we are giving up on funerals. Astoundingly (to me anyway) it reported ‘fewer than half our respondents said they want a funeral at all’. A procedure known as ‘direct cremation’, a plain disposal of the remains, is becoming popular.

Read the full article here.

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