Article: It's your funeral... Novelist Colin Thubron was ill with grief when he killed off a fictional heroine but is more sanguine about his own demise.

Byline: CELIA WALDEN

When you are young death is so unimaginable that when it happens to others they seem to belong to another race. There is a saying that God is like a thief: when you are young, you knock him down; when you are old, you are afraid that he's going to knock you down.

Western culture refuses to confront death, and for that reason there is very little written about it. The Americans, in particular, hate it because they passionately feel that something must be done about everything and the one thing that they can't do anything about is death. This is probably why, when people die, they are taken away to the sound of celestial music.

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