Happy Death Club

though the Natural Death Centre warns that a human corpse buried in the garden can reduce the value of your property by ‘between 20 percent and 50 percent.’5

Broadly, our choices in the modern era come down to burial or cremation.

Every day, more than 160,000 people die. The World Population Review puts this figure at a weirdly precise 166,859 people every day. More than 60.9 million per year.

But maybe a good death means a good life. A life not full of unfulfilled dreams, or plans for the future that will never be realised.

This book is dedicated to my enemies.

One day all of you will be dead.

But maybe a good death means a good life. A life not full of unfulfilled dreams, or plans for the future that will never be realised.

But I think in the end I would like to know that
it’s my time, like an animal tapping into some ancient knowledge lost to humans, and walk very deep into a forest, and simply sit down and listen to the birds. And after perhaps some hours or centuries I wouldn’t be me any more but would be part of the forest, slipping seamlessly into something bigger as day slips into night

Death is certainly often painful for those left behind, but what if we’re all wrong? What if dying really is an experience ‘of exquisite sweetness’, lifting us to some higher plane of consciousness? What if there really is nothing to fear?

The walls close in. I pretty much spent every day convinced I was going to die for no apparent reason. But I didn’t die. Sometimes you just carry on breathing, and that’s the most you can do, and it’s enough

Gypsy-Rose’s story reminds me that, if we put aside the ways in which true crime resonates with us, or the positive impact it has had, the genre has skewed reality to the point where we forget that there are real people and lives at the centre of each story. Things are rarely black and white