'After 10 decades of life, you need to be matter-of-fact about death'

Jennifer Sleeman believes the width of life is much more important than its length, yet in her 95 years she has succeeded in achieving both, writes Clodagh Finn

Jennifer Sleeman in the award-winning 'For When I Die' directed by Paul Power (2018). Just eight years before, on the eve of her 81st birthday, she made international headlines when she called for a single-Sunday boycott of Mass to protest about the lack of roles for women in the Catholic Church.

Jennifer Sleeman, aged 95, is so matter-of-fact about death that she had a coffin made for herself several years ago. She asked the man who carved her kitchen table if he would make one and when, a little surprised, he agreed, she lay down on the rug in her sitting-room to be measured up.

“We all die and I think it’s sad that we don’t talk about death,” she says with a gentle, disarming pragmatism that runs through all of her conversations on the subject.