My father died just before Christmas. He was nearly 80; he had been ill. Intellectually and rationally there should have been nothing startling about his death. Yet I have been as stunned by his death, and the utter absence of him, as if I never knew that human beings had a lifespan. I did understand that people die. I didn’t understand how the loss would feel. But it’s also that death has been so removed from our daily experience that it has become almost embarrassingly private. We have gone from the strict and public mourning rituals of the Victorian era, with widows in heavy black clothes for a year and a day, and men wearing black armbands to signify loss, to having no mechanisms to signal our sadness at all.

When it happened I realised that I, like many of us, had neither the public ritual nor the private knowledge to tell me how to get through this. I needed to talk to those who had already lived through it, and who could tell me what had helped them. Lastly, and almost most importantly, I wanted the close friends of mine who had never met my parents to know what had happened. And I wasn’t sure how far it was reasonable to ask for any of this from anyone. Mourners want to feel supported, but don’t know what they can expect from others. Friends and acquaintances can be quite oblivious to those needs. In that gap there is room for much uncertainty and disappointment to grow.

One friend of mine was bereft when her stepfather, the only constant parent in her life, died young. She arranged the funeral, then felt abandoned. She found herself longing for the Jewish rituals others observed. “What I really wanted was for people to sit shiva with me — where friends and neighbours mourn with you, and bring food, for seven days. I didn’t want to feel so alone.”

But I have also been struck by the way in which some people, while proudly rejecting formal rituals, expect everyone they know to have understood, by osmosis, that they should be following a very specific unwritten script. Some are furious their friends didn’t ask them out to social events shortly afterwards - “as if I was a leper!” — while others are furious that they did - “I don’t know how they could be so insensitive!”. Some are grateful for any expressions of sympathy; others are scathing about a remark they found clumsy, a letter that didn’t sum up the dead person accurately, a card they thought was trite. New technology has added to the minefield. An older generation expected, and received, handwritten letters upon a death.

A recent widower doesn’t like emails, for their lack of formality, but is grudgingly accepting of them if they are well thought out. He was livid, however, to receive one from an old friend which simply said, “Dear X, Words cannot express ...” No one would have sent such a letter.

Technology had become an excuse for making no effort. There are deep confusions here. Increasing numbers of us have rejected the old, codified forms of dealing with death in favour of something more personal, that we feel expresses both our grief and the

character of the person who has died. The terrible fact of death is the loss of history, love, connection and meaning. The only consolation it offers is that the sympathy we are given and the sorrow we share can bring us closer to the living.