In his book The Hour of Our Death, Philippe Aries describes us as a death-denying society – in the West, we have increasingly handed dying and its aftermath over to professionals – doctors and funeral directors.

Photographer Walter Schels, fearful of his own mortality, undertook a breathtakingly brave project: he photographed people near the end of their lives and then, with their prior permission, photographed them soon after their deaths. His interviews conveyed his subjects’ anger that others found it so hard to face up to their impending death. One interviewee described himself at death’s door and requiring intensive hospice nursing, yet his friends left at the end of a visit hoping he would get well soon. At the other end of the spectrum, many recently bereaved people sense others shying away from them, unsure what to say, so choosing to say nothing.

Funerals are the way we close the gap between the death that happens and the death that matters.

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