As a child, the Guardian and Observer writer – who died last year – often fantasised about her own ‘big death scene’. Then a terminal cancer diagnosis made things all too real
From an early age, I was obsessed by death. Cursed with a short temper, I was the sort of child who would storm off to my room when angry, where, lying on my bed, I would pass the time imagining my funeral and how devastated my family would be by my premature death.
There was something deeply satisfying about this. Something soothing about imagining such a thoroughly over-the-top scenario that spoke to my innate sense of the dramatic and tendency towards melodrama. At nine years old, I spent a lot of time reading books such as Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did. Instead of imagining that, having suffered a terrible accident, I would surprise all around me by becoming a “better” person, I would picture a terrible car crash or unexpected fall from which I didn’t recover but died.
