I’ve studied the history of death. I know how we can better face up to our grief – and our own mortality | Molly Conisbee

How we deal with bereavement has changed enormously over the years. But not all the old traditions should be forgotten

Many years ago, as part of a school homework project, I asked my grandparents what the most significant social change had been during their lifetime. Two of them answered child mortality". I was surprised. Weren't there other, more significant experiences in long lives that had stretched from the first and second world wars to the 1980s?

But now that I am older and have experienced bereavement, I understand their replies. Both grandparents had sisters who died of diphtheria. And my grandfather's younger brother died of sepsis, meaning his parents had buried two of their four children before the age of three. Their childhoods had been profoundly shaped by loss. Child mortality was, at that time, horrifyingly common, and from their earliest years many people spent a great deal of their lives coping with the emotional fallout of grief, which shaped their lives into older age.

Molly Conisbee is a social historian, visiting research fellow at the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, and author of No Ordinary Deaths