The right to choose how we say our last goodbye still escapes us

IT isn’t a question that anybody would like to have to answer yet it looms in the distance with certainty. It’s a conversation nobody looks forward to but should be undertaken with seriousness, because it lurks in everybody’s future.

Lately there seems to be some form of conversation beginning around this particular topic, but it’s still fair to say you would cripple any sociable chat in the pub if you divert it in this direction.

I refer to the ultimate question, if by ultimate you mean last: given a choice, how would you like to die? This query, or search for what might be termed ‘the good death’, is one which has challenged generations of mankind going back to the ancient Greeks, and beyond. Writers and thinkers have tried to address what makes a good and peaceful passing as a matter of course, with the emphasis on the word ‘try’: Montaigne practically invented a literary form in doing so back in the sixteenth century, the ‘essai’, or attempt, developing into the personal essay we are all now familiar with.