Death used to be part of everyday western life. Think of the Victorians and how even their clothes signalled to society a family’s bereavement. Indeed, death was so familiar that, if it came at the right moment, it was seen as a good thing – better, sometimes, than continued life. Remember Hamlet, who passes up a chance to kill Claudius because he is at prayer and so might go straight to heaven were he to be dispatched.

Nowadays, our cultural default mode is rather different. As Nora Ephron writes in her latest essay collection: “Death doesn’t really feel eventual or inevitable. It still feels . . . avoidable somehow.” Yet, as the baby boomers age, the opposite approach – facing death, or trying to – seems to be gaining some social traction. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s memoir of her husband’s death, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 20 weeks and Away from Her and Evening, two new films about disease and dying, are in the cinemas.