As absent from our speech as from their own funerals, the dead, too often, are erased from modern, Western society.  

This essay explores the sanitisation of death, and shifting attitudes to mortality, asking how we can face our own deaths without the rituals we have relied upon for centuries to dispose of the dead.

Centring around her personal experience of hosting several Death Cafes, in this article Clare Davies explores how they might restore ritual to our mourning practices, and help us to bring out of silence, what is, increasingly, taboo. 

She also muses upon the resorative powers of tea and cake, and her experience at a wild, windswept tea party on the summit of Beachy Head.