Quotes from Sue Black

but to be perfectly honest, I have never been spooked by the dead. It is the living who terrify me. The dead are much more predictable and co-operative.

The stark truth is, of course, that grief never dies. The American counsellor Lois Tonkin reminds us that loss isn't something we 'get over', and it doesn't necessarily lessen, either. It remains at the core of us and we just expand our lives around it, burying it deeper from the surface. So with time it may become more distant, more compartmentalised and therefore easier to manage, but it does not go away.

Fear of death is often a justifiable fear of the unknown; of circumstances beyond our personal control which we cannot know and for which we cannot prepare.

Humans belong to the group of conscious beings that are carbon-based, solar system-dependent, limited in knowledge, prone to error and mortal.' It is strangely comforting to be granted tacit permission to make mistakes just because we are human.

Our greatest conflicts and barriers exist in our minds and in the way we deal with our fears. It is pointless even to try to control that which cannot be controlled. What we can manage is how we approach and respond to our uncertainties.

I want to be able to recognise death, to hear her coming, to see her, to touch her, smell her and taste her; to undergo the assault on all of my senses and, in my last moments, to understand her as completely as is humanly possible.

Sometimes, a bone is just a coconut

Since there is no way we can ultimately prevent it, perhaps our time would be better spent focusing on improving and savouring the period between our birth and our death: our life.

All in all, the dead are a whole lot less trouble than the living

We don't all need to be geniuses; some of us just need to practical applicators and adapters.

Since most of us are products of a culture and era where nobody likes to discuss death in case it encourages her to visit,

Humans belong to the group of conscious beings that are carbon-based, solar system-dependent, limited in knowledge, prone to error and mortal.

As the writer and scientist Isaac Asimov put it: 'Life is pleasant, death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Granny had finished with dying, had died and was now dead – all very clear and distinct concepts in their minds. They were at ease with the finality. They know that the best memorial is a boxful of happy memories inside your head, and they know what a good death looks like.

I like to think my upbringing has made me pragmatic and thick-skinned, a coper and a realist

Death is coming, and if it wasn't today, it might tomorrow

I realised that day that when the animation of the person we were is stripped out of the vessel we have used to pilot our way through life, it leaves little more than an echo or a shadow in the physical world.

Once our long bones have finished growing (usually by around the age of fifteen or sixteen in girls and eighteen or nineteen in boys), we will have reached the maximum height we are ever going to be.

The American counsellor Lois Tonkin reminds us that loss isn't something we 'get over', and it doesn't necessarily lessen, either. It remains at the core of us and we just expand our lives around it, burying it deeper from the surface. So with time it may become more distant, more compartmentalised and therefore easier to manage, but it does not go away.

The best memorial is a boxful of happy memories inside your head

joking that the creaking gate always hangs the longest.

is Chandra Bahadur Dangi from Nepal, at 1ft 9½ins (54.6cm), a primordial dwarf who enjoyed a long life for those with his condition – he died in 2015 at the age of seventy-five. As is demonstrated by these examples, genetics is not the only influence on our adult stature.

While life expectancy may be variable, death expectancy remains unchanged.

The anthropologist who asserts absolute confidence in the sex, age, stature and ancestry of a skeleton is a dangerous and inexperienced scientist who doesn't understand human variability.