A is for Accidents, B is for Bone...D is for Death

How a brush with mortality inspired Sophie Duffy to write the book she needed to read.

Illustration by Diana Ejaita

In the summer, RLF Fellow Sophie Duffy had a book published. It was the book she’d needed to read. It was the book she’d been unable to find. Struggling with breast cancer but inspired by the students she was mentoring as an RLF Fellow at the University of Manchester, she had the courage to write what became D is for Death. We wanted to tell her story in honour of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

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In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic takes hold and the world begins retreating into itself, I am diagnosed with breast cancer. While the number of Covid deaths soar, I spend hours in hospital, alone, facing off my own mortality. Hooked up to drips, cold cap clamped to my head; I cannot see the smiles of the masked nurses. To pass the time, my drug-fogged brain will not let me read – let alone write – so I daydream.

I wonder about death. I tot up the losses in my life, the funerals I have attended. I devise my funeral plan. I ponder the afterlife, my brushes with ghosts, the miracle of the chemo drug extracted from the yew tree that is giving me an extra slice of life.

As lockdown lifts and my strength grows, I drag my family church-crawling, snooping around rural and urban graveyards, scrutinising weather-aged memorials, reimagining the lives of those who went before. We even spend a summer’s night champing (church camping) where we sleep soundly above the bones of the dead.

I start to read again, on the hunt for the elusive book on death that will cover everything I want to know. A year on, still searching, I am ready to take up my post as an RLF Fellow in the History Department of the University of Manchester.

After my initial imposter syndrome, I fall in love with the job. The students – young, intelligent, passionate about their subject – are a joy. As we look at their writing together, I encourage them to stand back from it, to read aloud, to consider their audience. We deconstruct what makes a good sentence and how each one works to create a good paragraph.

And, through this process, unexpectedly, I engage with my own writing in a new way. As a novelist, my attention has always been directed at my characters, at how they think and speak; the rules of grammar are loosely applied. But now, I dig up buried memories of school English lessons – main and subordinate clauses, a well-placed comma – and add this to my recent RLF training.

I encourage the students to finish with the most impactful clause of the most impactful sentence of a paragraph until, between us, we discover how a well-crafted paragraph fits into the overall structure of an essay. How a plan enables you to see the wood for the trees. And what this actually boils down to is the importance of clarity. In fiction, the writer often leaves gaps for the reader to fill, makes them work a bit. But not so for academic writing – it’s no good confusing your tutor.

Sophie Duffy, author of D is for Death

As the students progress, so too do I, until I begin to wonder if I can turn my hand to non-fiction. Because I have a book in mind: the book I have been unable to find. One that covers all aspects of death from anatomy to funerals, myths to zombies. And just as for the students with their essays, I need a plan. And here I have some inspiration: wondering through the university library, I see the alphabetisation of books and know that an A-Z structure will help contain this vast subject.

After writing an introduction (‘Why this book? Why now?’) I start with:

A is for Accidents

Sudden death at work, at play, on transport, at home… And, while there is so much I could write about, I limit myself to modern Britain, and know I must use the power of stories to bring my findings to life. This is where my novelist skills come into play: I will forge a narrative with pathos and humour, dramatised with people I have known or with people I will seek out in the hope they will entrust me with their stories.

A person like Elaine, a friend I knew in childhood, who survived the chemical explosion at Flixborough in 1974. And those Chinese cockle pickers of Morecambe Bay, where I lived as a student in the 80s. Living in the north-west, I will read about the mass fatalities of Hillsborough and how they still impact the city of Liverpool and about the largely forgotten devastating Summerland fire on the Isle of Man.

This will lead me onto transport and the infamous train disasters of last century and the lesser-known private tragedies that play out on our roads. Then finally to the most dangerous of all places: the home, where you are now more likely to die retrieving Christmas lights from the attic than you are in an industrialised factory.

While the research is heavy, it quickly becomes apparent that, in the UK, most accidents are preventable and all the while, I find myself making connections between these stories and real-life events. I see them play out in a way that could have been avoided were it not for negligence, greed and the relentless pursuit of progress.

The next chapter is:

B is for Bone

I focus on the human body and what happens to it in the lead up to death, at the point of death and postmortem. Our beliefs about it. What we can learn from it. How it can let us down. However,

C is for Contagion

is more personal and more pertinent to the time of writing. For centuries, death has been just one step ahead of us – the Plague, cholera, typhoid, smallpox, HIV/AIDS, the whole gamut of Top Trumps infectious diseases – but the last few generations have fared better thanks to improved healthcare and the mass rollout of vaccinations. Until 2020. While there are parties in Downing Street, I am alone in hospital, enduring months of tough treatment, vulnerable and isolating, separated from my mum and children for eight months.

But I am lucky. I do not lose any loved ones to Covid. My treatment is not delayed. I don’t have to give birth without a partner or attend a bare-boned funeral. I read Samuel Pepys diary of the Great Plague of 1665 and know that lockdown, heavy death tolls, weekly death announcements – none of this is new. I spend my fifty-fifth birthday visiting the plague village of Eyam, a poignant and pioneering place of social distancing, and wonder if we will ever learn from the past.

Over the next couple of years, I work my way through the alphabet until I reach Z. The book has concentrated on the UK, but I want to end with a more outward-looking chapter.

Z is for Zaduszki

This is the Polish holiday where families visit the graves of loved ones – celebrates death festivals and customs from around the world, and it enables me to put Britain into context on the global death map.

I think we need to emulate the death-positive customs and attitudes from other countries, adding to the growing conversation in this country where many are striving to make death part of everyday life so that we can live it more fully.

After all, death is as old as the world which we inhabit. It is nothing remarkable. And yet for the individual and their family, it is. Each death is unique. Each story.

By the time I reach the end of the book, I can see how, while I moved from writing novels to writing non-fiction, each aspect has fed into the other, that facts and information can flag up a point to be made, but that it is stories that illuminate these points.

I reflect that, while that A-Z plan kept me on track, I had to delve into the darkest parts of my own story to make an overarching narrative thread. Perhaps, after all, this is not a straightforward non-fiction book. Perhaps it is genre-busting. But what I know for sure is that my University of Manchester students helped me tackle my bravest project to date.

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Sophie Duffy is a novelist who has turned her attention to creative non-fiction/memoirs. She has published four novels, including The Generation Game and Betsy and Lilibet, all by Legend Press and a further two under the pseudonym Lizzie Lovell for Allen and Unwin. She is also part of CreativeWritingMatters, who offer writer services and run the Exeter Novel Prize. A Devonian, she has migrated to the Wirral. Her latest publication is D is for Death, a non-fiction book full of stories, information and memoirs about death, dying, grief and everything death-related.