TOM MORTON’S GUIDE TO THE ‘DEATH MOVEMENT’ IN FIVE WEBSITES

The Death Café website is comprehensive and worldwide, with a guide to events and cafés happening near you no matter where on the planet you live. There is also a host of carefully curated material which anyone interested will find helpful and informative. www.deathcafe.com

Dying Matters “Raising Awareness of death, dying and bereavement” contains a host of useful information. www.dyingmatters.org

There’s the great Caitlin Doughty, undertaker extraordinaire, and her Order of the Good Death, which is particularly good from an American point of view on the “Death Positive” movement. www.orderofthegooddeath.com

Final Fling is blunt, bright and breezy (“Sort Your Affairs!”) but full of both good humour and sensible advice, as well as excellent links to other associated organizations. Not everyone will want to call their funeral a “final fling” but if you do, there is a comprehensive set of guidelines on how to organize it. It’s based in Scotland, so be warned – it has a Fling-a-Bongo Game and a Coffin Club. Deep frying may also be involved. www.finalfling.com

Life, Death, Whatever hosted by Anna Lyons and Louise Winter. Anna is a “death doula”, someone who works with the dying and their families in the final days of life. A social worker of the last days. Louise is a funeral director. There is a lot of excellent material on funerals and the whole process of what they call “an initiative to redesign the dialogue around death”. www.lifedeathwhatever.com