Eleven pm. The only word on my planning sheet so far is “death”. After 15 minutes of staring at the page and doodling in the margin, the only other word added to the document is “complicated”, underlined several times in now blunt pencil. Teaching about topics like this should be straightforward, but whenever this particular lesson comes around it feels as if I’m teaching it for the first time.
When I began my career seven years ago, I naively thought – or perhaps it never occurred to me it would be otherwise – that almost every student in front of me experienced a childhood not dissimilar to mine.

Death, though it featured, was not a notable part of it – certainly not the death of a parent or sibling or even a grandparent. For most of my early life, I had three great-grandparents whom I saw very frequently. They seemed to me to be fit and well and full of energy, until one day they weren’t, and then they passed away peacefully.

There was nothing frightening or distressing about this to me, though it was certainly very sad. I think this was because I had never had reason to ponder what death might mean, neither for me nor for anyone else.