In this new collection, the author draws on her experiences as an undertaker and as a celebrant at secular funerals to compose an extended meditation on dying and death, its emotional grammar and its painful but necessary rituals. Valentine explores the geography of death - hospital corridors and waiting rooms, winter tides, tearful winds and rain-swept cemeteries - and considers the strangers - doctors, mortuary assistants, and undertakers - who must escort us towards oblivion.