Perfect Strangers

My daughter was born in autumn. I still remember those first months clearly: hours-long walks while she slept in the pram, the rustle of leaves underfoot, and the quiet feeling of letting go of one version of myself while growing into another.

I was on one of those walks when my phone rang. On the other end was Patrick, a perfect stranger to me at the time, who'd heard through the grapevine that I was active in the death space and wanted to work more in and around death and loss himself. We talked as I pushed the pram through the leaves, and by the time I got home, something had shifted.

We decided to launch a community space together, right in the middle of a pandemic. In hindsight, the timing made a strange kind of sense: death was everywhere that year, in the news, in the numbers, in the quiet dread behind every phone call from someone you loved. So we started small. Virtual gatherings, around once a month, where more perfect strangers came together on a screen to talk about the things nobody else in their life particularly wanted to discuss.

What struck me straight away was how beautiful, and how genuinely life-affirming, it was to sit with people and share our fears, our experiences, our hopes, in a year that felt so dark. People arrived guarded and left lighter. Something about naming the thing out loud, together, made it easier to carry.

There's a particular kind of relief in talking to strangers about death. You don't have to protect them the way you'd protect someone who loves you. You don't have to manage their fear on top of your own, or worry that what you say will sit in their head at three in the morning. Talking to people who aren't tangled up in your daily life means you can just say the true thing, without having to think about how it'll land at the dinner table.

Six years have passed since Over My Dead Body was born, and I walked through those woods, and autumn still does something to me. It makes change visible. What's ending, what's beginning, and what I've already left behind without quite noticing at the time. Every year, when the leaves start coming down, I think about that phone call, and about all the perfect strangers who've held space for death with us since. How much beauty in decay…