Why we should be better about talking about death, with Dr Helen Gittos

For our ancestors, death was part of daily life. We can learn from their open conversations about this taboo topic, says Dr Helen Gittos, and create modern rituals to help us cope

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Published: September 5, 2025 at 9:00 AM

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We don’t know how to talk about death. It’s a modern taboo. Search the topic online and you’ll quickly find people who deal in end-of-life matters arguing that we need more transparent, more honest conversations about an event that is, after all, going to come to us all. Charities like Hospice UK definitely want us to be better about talking about it.

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It wasn’t always this way. In fact, it’s only really in the 20th century that we’ve actively disassociated ourselves from death. The process has been institutionalised and medicalised. The palliative care physician and author Kathryn Mannix wrote about it in a Guardian article a few years ago.

In the 19th century, according to the historian Judith Flanders, discussing Victorian death and mourning on a recent episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, “ it was part of daily life. It wasn’t tucked away neatly in hospitals where you go in and visit for an hour, but you don’t see all the day-to-day stuff, you don’t see people die”. She continues: “Many people go happily through their whole lives without ever seeing a dead person, which is simply not possible in the 19th century. Then, hospitals were very limited in the kind of diseases or illnesses they cared for. They were very specifically for certain things only. If you could afford it, you were looked after at home. Hospitals were a place of last resort for people who were too poor, too desperate, so everybody saw death.”

A bracelet with two gold edged picture frames on it. In each, there is a photo of a girl with brown ringlets and wearing a purple dress

This Victorian bracelet has a band of woven hair and may have been a piece of mourning jewellery, which was in fashion during that era (Image by Getty Images)

Past and present rituals

I went to a funeral the other day. It was of a dear friend who had died far too young, of cancer. She knew it was coming and had been able to prepare, and had, I think, had frank and open conversations with her husband and daughters. I don’t think that’s the norm, but that did mean that the crowded crematorium felt more like a genuine celebration of her life. There was also a modern ritual as we wept through a slide show of her greatest hits, set to music.

Obviously my thoughts were drawn to this when I was talking to Dr Helen Gittos, a medieval historian at Oxford University. Her Life Lesson from History was that rituals really matter, and that we can learn from the past to make better use of them.

It can be hard to identify what medieval people were doing by way of rituals, because that sort of activity isn’t necessarily documented. We’re talking about things that might be more informal and familial. That’s where archaeology comes to the fore. Helen told me about her research into a collection of 12th-century lead crosses that had been discovered in the grounds of the monastery at Bury St Edmunds. They all had scratched inscriptions on them.

Helen worked out that the inscriptions related to a ceremony of consecration of a new church, and they were the words the bishop would say as he stepped over the threshold of the building. But these crosses had nothing to do with new church foundation – they were found with the remains of dead monks. Helen concluded that this was evidence of some sort of protective ritual for the monks, to keep the devil away and Christ close. We wouldn’t know that without her close detective work and leap of imagination to tease out the ritual underlying the artefacts.

Navigating grief

A painting shows a woman leaning over the edge of a bed, holding the arm of an unseen person. She has her head resting on it and a sad expression on his face

A 13th-century fresco by Giotto shows St Clare mourning St Francis, one of the many depictions of lamentation in the Middle Ages (Image by Getty Images)

Rituals and death are close bedfellows. End of life is a time when we need a support structure to navigate the grief. Helen’s academic experience sadly collided with her everyday as she coped with the death of her young daughter, Harriet, and the challenge of finding the right way to say goodbye.

“At the time at which she died, I was writing that piece about the Bury St Edmunds crosses. I was in the middle of it and it’s hard sometimes to be a historian and not to turn off your historian’s head. So all the way through, I was watching and contrasting the way in which we now deal with death, with what I was looking at in the 11th and 12th centuries,” she explains. “Harriet died in hospital and the staff there wanted to try and help us, to wash her, to give her the kind of care that would have happened at home in the period that I was studying. Real efforts were made to try to include families, but there were also bits of it that were just so far away from what I’d been seeing that these monks were doing.”

Rituals and death are close bedfellows. End of life is a time when we need a support structure to navigate the grief

Helen described the perfunctory experience of being handed a “cool bag and a chit, which was a bit like the kind of thing you might get if you’d taken your shoes in to be mended” for her daughter’s body in a hospital. She felt “the contrast between thinking of those monks who were employing such care, love, attention, effort and craft to help their loved ones. That was one of those sudden moments of shock, a reminder that history isn’t a linear progression of things getting better. Sometimes the contrasts are really, really stark.”

Death as part of life

A group of people dressed in smart Victorian clothing (waistcoats, white shirts and long coats) stand around fresh burial spot

A painting of a peasant burial in the 19th century, an era when the realities of death and dying were not hidden away (Image by Getty Images)

The medieval world, like the later Victorian period, was, as Helen points out, a place where death was a close reality, not hidden away. People died at home, surrounded by family, and the community came together to mark the passage from life to death.

Helen told me this ritual process started before the death. People got ready for the inevitable: “One of the most striking things is that you have these ritual texts that are about guiding you to a good death.” It seems that people in the Middle Ages strove to make death a community activity, to create “a moment in which people were coming together to commemorate and note what’s passing, and also to manage the change that comes with that”.

Fascinatingly, and I’d agree that this is something we really don’t do enough of today, Helen explains how there were rituals designed to follow up after someone’s death. “There were rituals for the deathbed, for the moment of death, for the funeral, and for the months and years that followed,” she says. “We’re all very good at contacting somebody in a moment of crisis. Many of us are less good at contacting them a month later, three months later, a year later. One of the things that was really characteristic about the Middle Ages was this formal way in which there were rituals that followed death that helped people to negotiate the aftermath, not just the moment itself.”

An illustrated page that shows a small yellow skull on a green table, surrounded by a pink letter O and several flowers

A 15th-century illuminated initial with a skull, a symbol of death, found at the start of the Office of the Dead, a Christian prayer read in spiritual preparation for death (Image by Getty Images)

Reclaiming ritual and conversation

So what can we do? How can we learn from the past to face death more honestly and compassionately?

Helen believes that we need both structure and flexibility. “Ritual often gives us a sort of framework for how to act at moments in which we feel lost, shocked and uncertain, and when we want a map for how to navigate some period of major change and a way of doing that collectively. But I think what rituals also do, and we have increasingly understood this, is to give a sense of freedom, flex and scope to create anew within that framework. That allows these improvisations to feel right and appropriate.”

She describes how, in planning her daughter’s funeral, she drew on both historical knowledge and personal intuition. “I was glad that what we crafted in a very short period of time did end up feeling really right. We dispensed with all of the formality and we simply put together things that involved real music and musicians playing live. A friend found a wonderful pianist and we had a whole series of family members who read things that mattered to them. And then afterwards we took everybody and we walked back to the hospital where she died because there was a playground there, and we all gathered there among these play things and were able to be in an environment that felt right for me and right enough for the people who were close to us.”

Moving forward

An illustration of a group of people dressed in green and brown robes surround a body wrapped in a shroud and rope, which they are burying

A burial scene from the Middle Ages, as shown in 15th-century illustrated romance in verse titled Barlaam und Josaphat (Image by Getty Images)

So I’m getting a couple of really good lessons here from Dr Helen Gittos, and from our medieval forebears. Firstly, we should be better about talking about death: with our families, our friends, and our communities. Secondly, we should be open to claiming and creating the rituals that help us to mourn and remember, and we should not be afraid to improvise, to make them our own.

As Helen put it, “Rituals are things that we can use creatively in order to be able to manage. I think that we can be braver about creating rituals that work for us, even with the institutional context that so often surround major moments in our lives. We don’t have to simply accept the impersonal, formulaic, 30 minutes in and out of the crematorium.” She points out that there are people who are “creating new ways of doing things, burying people in woodland, making services which are a bit less formulaic, a bit more creative”. This can be “enormously beneficial for feeling like these are moments that we have managed, that we can dare to navigate ourselves – that we don’t need to rely on outside professionals to do them for us.”

Let’s embrace rituals that help us cope with times of grief, and let’s be creative about them. Let’s talk about death. It’s going to happen to us, and our loved ones. We can make things easier on ourselves, and everyone around us, by just being a bit more honest and open about it.

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This article is part of HistoryExtra's new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter for more articles and podcasts exploring the ways in which history can help us live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.

Authors

Dr David Musgrove, FSAContent director

David Musgrove is the content director at HistoryExtra

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