Talking about death

From a BBC interview, this is interesting from a pastoral perspective too:

If you're a young person and you're facing death then you will talk about it, as Jade Goody so evidently did, but deaths under 40, the majority of them are road traffic accidents, so there's no talking time and no preparation. Then 40-60, people have life-threatening illnesses and on the whole, they talk. But the overwhelming majority of deaths are older people and I can tell you from my own research that when older people say to their families, 'I want to talk to you about my funeral', which is a way of wanting to talk about death, a typical response is 'Oh, you don't want to talk about that stuff, that's depressing, you'll go on for a long time'. So if we can create opportunities with people who will listen carefully and be non-judgemental, then you can give them a real lift, because as older people face what we call finitude, the coming of the end of life, many of them become very, very anxious and full of guilt and they've got no-one to talk to

Malcolm Johnson, Professor of Gerontology at Bath
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8058047.stm