Why am I reading so much about death lately? This is a wryly funny and cosily charming book about council funerals.

Evie King conducts Section 46 funerals under the Public Health Act. If you die and there's no one else around who is able to arrange your funeral, the local council steps in. This could be a coldly bureaucratic process with no wiggle room for anything other than perfunctory sympathy. But humans are going to human. Why wouldn't you put some effort in to making people feel cherished in death?

In many ways, this is what Cameron's "Big Society" should have been about. Giving empathetic and passionate people a chance to serve their community and enrich all our lives. And, I guess, deaths. But austerity makes it hard to stay motivated when you're doing multiple people's jobs for a fraction of the pay.

This isn't to say King is a whinger - quite the opposite - but she is clearly frustrated that she cannot do more. People who interact with the state are rarely in a good emotional or financial place. Those interacting with Section 46 deserve more support than is available to them. What King does is marvellous - but necessarily limited. In effect, it is a series of short stories each taking a look at a different death and how she tried as hard as possible to make the funeral process as painless and uplifting as it can be.

The book is, naturally, a little upsetting in places. It isn't so much that people die; it is how society reacts which causes such emotional turmoil. Why are people sometimes abandoned? Why do reconciliations never happen until it is too late? How do we deal with trauma?

It is an excellent book but it is rather annoying that the publisher, Mirror Books only makes the eBook available via Amazon. There's no other way to read it - not even via a library! I resorted to borrowing the audiobook. This was the first audiobook I've ever listened to - and it was a rather curious experience. The author's voice was slightly hesitant at first, but gradually became more passionate and evocative. It was wonderful to hear her tell her story directly.

Is it possible to "die well"? We have midwives for births, should we have "deathwives" for the other end of our lives? I think this book was recommended to me in the depths of the pandemic. I was too much of a chicken to read it while those around me were dying. The book aims to normalise the process of death and mostly succeeds. Unlike a lot of books, it doesn't just identify a problem - it provides pages of solutions. Every chapter ends with a series of questions to ask yourself (or your loved ones) about death.

At times, it is utterly heartbreaking and more than a little gruesome. Death is emotionally and physically distressing. Similarly, there are several stories which deal with the reality of assisted dying. I think the author comes down against euthanasia - but it certainly helps raise questions of whether repeatedly offering the option amounts to pressuring them into an unwanted decision.

It is a bit homespun and cloying. I felt like it painted quite a rosy picture of what death can look like. All the nurses are angels and the doctors have endless patience, there's always time for a cuppa and deathbed revelations are never awkward.

Oh, and there's a lovely aside about memorial benches being harbingers of doom, which I found quite amusing!

This will probably sit unread on your ebook for far too long - but it is worth cracking it open and thinking about the questions it raises.

Most online services are designed for the "happy path". Users never change name, gender remains fixed, spouses never divorce, and customers live forever. The real world is a tad more complicated. As the book puts it:

When death occurs for users and platforms, it becomes a kind of glitch that reveals needs that designers did not originally consider.

This is an exploration of what happens to our digital remains after we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

Did you know that graves are regularly re-used? The plot your dear old granny is buried in, will one day make room for someone else's beloved. The same is true on the Internet.

When Paul created a memorial website for Julie, julieslife.com, he found that two other women named Julie had used that domain before; he was building on top of their digital traces.

It is worth noting that this is an academic book. It is rather heavy on the (Marxist) theory and a little unforgiving to the casual reader.

In Chun’s estimation, digital information is itself “undead,” having ghostly qualities that she likens to Karl Marx’s commodity fetishism: “if a commodity is, as Marx famously argued, a ‘sensible supersensible thing,’ information would seem to be its complement: a supersensible sensible thing.”

Death is hard work for all involved. Do you want your loved ones to be burdened with the admin of keeping your domain active? Do they really want the hassle of sorting through your MP3s? Does anyone care about your custom Netflix algorithm?

One of the hardest things I had to do recently was "unfriend" someone who had died. The platform didn't have a "memorial" option, and I kept being suggested to reconnect with someone who was uncontactable without a Ouija Board. The book points out how Facebook and other platforms evolved to support the death of their users - even though the platforms were sometimes reluctant in the face of hostility from the living.

Instead of trusting religious entities with their immortal souls, users should put their faith in the tech industry. Rather than employing established institutions or kinship networks to manage digital belongings, ordinary users are expected to outsource that labor to a host of relatively new web-based companies that might very well dissolve within a decade.

These are secular problems which remain unsolved. They cannot be solved by the current cultural hegemon:

Digital remains are dependent on the global reach and future existence of successful platforms, but they are also mostly located in the United States, particularly in the San Francisco Bay area and along the West Coast.

The author also directly attacks me:

Smart homes are designed according to the specifications of those who build them and do not take into account the desires of those who inherit them. They are fundamentally incompatible with the collective care work needed to keep them running.

Harsh but fair!

I could quote endlessly from this book. It points out how digital devices become haunted objects, as our last wishes cascade through endless algorithms, how we don't control digital products in the same way as we do the physical, and how it is our duty to die responsibly.

It is a little heavy on the Marxist discourse but, to be fair, the right-wing are incapable of writing anything academic - so the free market has prevailed and delivers us Socialist dreams.

The only question I have left to ask is: who gets my ringtones when I die?

A few months ago I was checking my email in bed (always a bad idea) when the vanity alert I have for my name appeared. Google took great delight in telling me that "Terence Eden passed away peacefully..."

I had a minor heart attack and continued reading,

"...at the Belleville General Hospital at the age of 98."

Ah! Phew! Not me, thankfully.

It's rare that I get mistaken for a different Terence. Mostly because there's a wide variety of ways to spell my name. Back when I first got online there was only one other prominent Terence Eden - the 8th Baron Auckland. I don't think we were related, and I've since surpassed the Right Hon. gentleman in the Google rankings.

I'm not particularly interested in family trees. But this specific Terence Eden was also unrelated to me, as far as I can tell. There's very little information about him, and I didn't want to bother his family at their time of grief.

Thankfully, this isn't a Buttle/Tuttle mix-up. Just a reminder that no one is ever as unique as they think they are.

You can read Terence Eden's obituary online.

And in the end... Nothing.

This is the story of mental health failings across the board. Not just in the way the UK institutionalised so many people who needed care and compassion, but also about the consequences of enabling people with severe delusions.

It's a grimly hilarious book. It never pokes fun at those who were convinced they were seers - instead it snarks about the institutions around them.

The male [hospital] wards were named after celebrated men from the county, such as Charles Darwin and A. E. Housman, and the female wards were named after trees because no one could find a list of famous Shropshire ladies.

I came away from it fascinated at how easy it was for people to go down the wrong path. I don't think any of the subjects had ill-intent; but there was mutual exploitation.

Astonishing from start to finish. In the end, it is a biography of tragedy. So many lives wasted in the pursuit of the futile.

It used to be the case that we started every 'Camp with a reading of the rules. A gentle intro to let everyone be on the same page.

The "rules" started out as:

1. Whoever comes are the right people.
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
3. Whenever it starts is the right time.
4. When it is over, it is over.

Over time, people added the rule of mobility (leave a session if it isn't for you), the rule of participation (listen more than you speak), the no-tourists rule (everyone must contribute). And so on.

Reading the Rules has fallen out of fashion, and some of the rules need updating. But perhaps it is time to bring back the idea of starting the day off with a common understanding?

I thought that it might be nice to turn an introductory rule-reading into a sort of legacy for our friends and colleagues. A way to let participants know that they are part of a community.

So, with apologies to those I've missed, here's the start of a proposal for a new set of rules.

• In memory of David Pearson - take photos! Take many, brilliant, beautiful photos. Document the day and share it with others. Be respectful of those who don't want their photos taken or published.
• In memory of John Popham - do something today to make someone's life better. Help people tell their stories.
• In memory of Nick Keane - be open about yourself. Embrace who you are.
• In memory of Hendrik Grothuis - plant a tree. Think about the environmental impact you're having today.
• In memory of Rupert Bowater - Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think.

I am painfully aware of the inherent biases encoded in this list. I'd love it if you would contribute rules, memories, and suggestions. Perhaps, when all this is over, we can have a GovCamp to mourn our lost friends and celebrate those of us who made it through.

The funeral is done, the grief lingers on. What should I do now?

Do I stop following his accounts?

I don't want to. In part, because I don't want to think he's gone. But on a practical level, if I don't then I know some well-meaning AI will suddenly say "Hey! You haven't talked to your mate in aaaaages! Why not give him a poke?! ?"

Of course, if I do unfollow him, I'll get a whole bunch of "people you know also follow..." with his face staring back at me.

Or, perhaps one of the apps he authorised will get hacked, and I'll be left facing post-mortem-spam.

Christian Payne

@Documentally

I just got a direct message from @craigmanganello ..nearly 4 years after he died. Feels like spam has defiled his grave.

---

Should I delete his number from my phone?

Last year a different friend gave up on social media and deleted all her accounts. One day, an app in my pocket buzzed to tall me that she'd joined their service. I was flabbergasted and sent her a quick hello.

It wasn't her. She'd changed phone numbers and - as happens in the UK - the number was eventually assigned to someone else. It was that interloper who'd joined. But the social-network-graph doesn't really account for such changes to "unique" identifiers.

Deleting someone from your contacts has a grim feeling of finality to it. Perhaps I just need to get it over and done with.

How do you let people know?

People don't have little paper address books any more. The ones they do have are locked behind the unforgiving fortress of biometric security. So his family asked friends to reach out to more nth-degree-of-separation friends to let the know the dreadful news and details of the funeral.

I remember my parents making such phone calls when I was a kid. Always the same patter, "Are you sat down? I'm afraid I have some horrible news..."

But the enforced brevity of Twitter doesn't really allow for such niceties, does it?

Sending an email seems... I don't know... impersonal? But there's a whole bunch of mutual friends who exist, for me, only as text on a screen. Do I call them? Do I BCC them? What emoji conveys the right amount of reverence for the situation?

How, in a little screen, do you mentally prepare someone for a shock? Is the subject line "Some terrible news about our friend" too much? Too little?

The Funeral

I would live-tweet a funeral, take selfies with the deceased

Tacky - "Weird Al" Yankovic

I mean, that's crazy, right? But that's how a bunch of us knew him - through social media.

Yes, selfies at a funeral are a thing - they're a social object which has been the subject of much discussion. Some friends of mine advocate photographing the funeral in the same way you would any other significant occasion.

What's the right balance? Checking in on FourSquare seems a little disrespectful, but is it OK to live-stream the ceremony on Periscope to those who can't make it?

Preparing for the inevitable

Perhaps selfishly, my thoughts turned to my own mortality. I've got life assurance to take care of my family financially, and I have a Will to sort out any property issues - but what about my digital life?

Google has the euphemistically named "Inactive Account Manager". I've set it so my family has access to my account should I die.

Facebook has a "Legacy Contact setting".

A legacy contact is someone who you choose to manage your account after you pass away. They'll be able to do things like pin a post on your Timeline, respond to new friend requests and update your profile picture. They won't post as you or see your messages

My password manager has a sharing function which, if I set it correctly, should smooth access to some of my accounts.

And as for everything else...? Who knows. Do the half-a-dozen people who follow me on an obscure social network care that I'm gone? Will it be distressing for my relatives to receive reminder emails from them?

The aftermath

Every so often, someone - who hadn't realised he's gone - drops a note on his wall wishing him happy birthday. Or sends an @ message to a few of us. It's not their fault, but it is hard not to feel a little pang of anger and then sadness.

The real pain is looking through the list of friends streaming by and wondering if I'm being good enough to them.

Is "Liking" a Tweet a substitute for a pint of a beer and a natter? Is scrawling "Happy birthday" in a WhatsApp message as good as ringing up for a chat?

And now?

If you'd like to donate to my friend's memorial, there is a JustGiving campaign running (oh, look, another social network).

Suicide is the single biggest killer of men aged under 45 in the UK.

If you're in pain or distress, you're not alone. You can always find someone to talk to.