Charlotte Bennett on death, money and theatre

The first dead body I saw was my daughter’s. I have to admit it was a bit of an extreme induction to death.

It was 2021. She was one day old and I held her as she died very unexpectedly at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Just 24 hours earlier I had given birth to her, welcomed her into this world and our lives were full of hope and excitement. Now it was crashing down around us.

Fast forward nine months, and me and my partner are sat with my mother-in-law in another hospital as she takes her last breath following a heart attack.

Move on another two months and I am holding my mum’s hand as she dies in St Gemma’s Hospice in Leeds, mere months after being diagnosed with cancer.

2021-2022 turned out to be the year I would come face to face with what it means to die. And it taught me more about life than you can possibly imagine.

Since then, it’s been important for me to try and encourage conversations about death. To remove the taboo and to empower people to talk about it before facing it. I had certainly never paid much attention to it before I was sat watching my daughter die in my arms.

Could anything have prepared me for that moment? I imagine not, but had I engaged more with the concept of death before, I know there are certainly things that would have helped me along the way.

And so I have been wondering why talking about dying matters to me.

Death is overwhelming, excruciating and most importantly, unavoidable.

It is the one experience we are all guaranteed.

When Margot died it made me confront mortality in the most head-on way. And in so many ways it made me more prepared for when I lost my mum. It gave me the confidence and the language to talk to her about her choices and wishes and priorities. It made me lean into talking to her about what was happening to her, rather than avoiding it.

We talked weeks before she died about how we both feared death less since losing Margot; that if she could go through this thing, we could too, and that we knew we would be joining her wherever she is and whatever we each believed in what that meant for us. She told me about some songs she wanted at her funeral and that she was scared. I could comfort her and face it with her as much as I could before it was time for her to continue that journey alone.

This isn’t to say these conversations were not agonising. They were.

It isn’t to say that I didn’t get that awful feeling in the pit of my stomach every time we talked about it and sobbed into my pillow for hours after. I did.

But after she had died I have found so much comfort in knowing I was able to have those conversations in those moments, because hey guess what: she was dying regardless of whether I was able to talk about it or not.

Since then I have come to realise we were probably only able to talk about it because of losing Margot. This was a gift she gave us, the ability to be able to engage with the thing we all try fervently to ignore.

Months after my mum died, a play pitch landed on my desk from the writer Kelly Jones.

It was an idea for a play about a woman who loses her mum, and can’t claim her body because she can’t afford the funeral costs, which she would then be liable for. The average minimum cost of a funeral in England is £4,000. And if you can’t pay, the council step in and you get a ‘pauper’s burial’ (as it is still referred to today… way to make you feel okay about being poor, right?)

I certainly didn’t know any of these things before my mother-in-law died; financial burden didn’t apply to Margot as children’s funerals are free. In these cases, not only have you lost your mum, but you have a giant debt to meet, and quick. Mortuaries in England are currently overrun, in part due to increased ambulance wait times, and they can’t wait there forever.

There is a saying that death is the great leveller, and that we all end up in the same box at the end of the day.

But actually, it turns out that’s not true, because that box is really quite expensive.

In fact, coffins are one of the most expensive parts of the funeral, and especially if you want anything extra from the ‘brochure’ they give you to ‘choose’ from (there’s a whole other article I could write on the problematic language in these places like you’re buying a flipping package holiday… but that’s for another time.)

This play was about more than that though.

It was about a woman trying to reach a point of being able to grieve and being blocked at every angle by money.

It was about how working-class people are the bottom of the pile in death as much as in life.

It was a furious roar about the injustice of there being a price-tag to having a dignified end after years of funding cuts to the support that previously would have helped you if you were in this situation.

It was about the privilege of being able to grieve that so many take for granted.

But alongside that it was also really, really funny.

Which felt right: some of my weirdest funniest memories exist in my year of death. I ended up getting married in mum’s hospice so she could be there for it, and my sister walked me down the aisle in the hospice garden as the dying residents cheered from their windows. We all found ourselves in fits of laughter days later at the strangeness of that moment, and the fact that I was now on my ‘Hospice Honeymoon’ as my brother went to go and get me and my new husband smoothies from the cafe like we were having cocktails on the beach.

Kelly’s script pitch was full of playfulness. It played with form and space, it played with its audience, and it made me angry. It made me angry that this woman was having to choose between stepping into a space where she would have to exploit herself in order to be able to bury her mum. It made me infuriated about how our inability to talk about death and money – two of life’s greatest taboos – could collide in such a catastrophic way for a protagonist who just wants to say goodbye to her mum.

After my ‘year of death’, I questioned myself a lot about whether doing a play about a death would feel right, but I found myself compelled to work on it.

Instead of my experiences with death making me want to talk about it less, it left me wanting to talk about it more. And I know there are many, many people out there who feel the same way, or who just need that extra bit of love and encouragement to do so.

That year changed my life irreversibly and I can’t and won’t ignore that, my experiences have been so profound and there is no way to sideline them now.

And besides, this story just wouldn’t leave me. And so Kelly and I – together with our partners and collaborators – began the process of wrangling it into shape. It’s a wriggly little play to get right, but it’s the kind of story that only exists in a theatre space and that’s why I love it.

I have reflected throughout this process on how funerals are also inherently theatrical events. They are a place to come together to hear stories being told in a moment of collective emotion: collective mourning, collective memories, collective laughter.

They provide a space of community and a way to feel less alone at a time when you need it the most. They are confronting and often surprising, beautiful and moving; all the ingredients I look for in a great new play and all the things I value and am excited about sharing in this one.

And so I encourage you to step into this uncomfortable space. To think about what death means to you.

I have been asking myself how I would want to die if I am privileged enough to have some agency over it, (because of course it might be that our lives are taken from us without warning).

But given the choice, I would like to die somewhere beautiful and peaceful and quiet.

I would like my partner and my living daughter Neave to be with me and holding my hand. To feel their love around me.

I would like to be able to tell them that it’s going to be okay. That death is part of life. And that no matter how hard it is now that they must keep going, because they never know what adventures lie ahead.