The hard pages

The parent page is right to include this and right to keep it short. This adds one practical thing that nobody thinks of at the time and that matters enormously afterwards.

Write it down at the time

In an ordinary death there is a doctor, a certificate and a registrar, and the record makes itself. If none of that is available, the record has to be made by whoever is there, and it has to be made at the time.

That record is what later allows the death to be registered formally, an estate to be settled, a pension or a benefit to be sorted out, and a family to have straight answers. Memory will not do it. Within days the details blur, and within months people disagree about them.

Take photographs if you can bring yourself to. Of the place, and of any marker. They are difficult to take and they are what makes a site findable and a record credible later.

Keep it with the household documents, and tell somebody else it exists.

Then, when services return, report it. A death that could not be certified in the ordinary way goes to the coroner, and that is the proper route rather than a problem to avoid. Nobody is in trouble for a death recorded honestly in circumstances where nothing else was possible; the difficulty comes from there being no record at all.

Burial, if it comes to that

First, the thing that is genuinely surprising: burial on private land is lawful in England and Wales. It is not a workaround and it is not what this section is quietly teaching you to get away with. It needs the landowner's consent, it must not cause a nuisance or pollute water, and it has to be recorded, including on the deeds of the land. The rules below are the ordinary rules for a lawful private burial, not an emergency substitute for them.

Second, and this is the part the whole section rests on: none of the legal duties go away. A death must still be registered, and the duty to do it does not lapse because there was nobody to register it with at the time. If a death cannot be certified in the ordinary way it goes to the coroner, and that stays true whether it happens next Tuesday or in the third month of something. A burial does not close a death. The record does. That is why the record above matters more than anything in this section.

The parent page gives the essentials. A few more, briefly.

• Well away from any watercourse, well or borehole, and downhill of any water supply. The Environment Agency's actual distances for a private burial are at least 10 metres from a dry ditch or field drain, 30 metres from a spring or any running or standing water, and 50 metres from any well, borehole or spring that supplies water for use. The parent's 60 metres clears all three and is the same figure the sanitation chapter uses, so keep it as the working rule and treat it as a floor.
• Not waterlogged ground, and deep is not the same as deeper. There is no legal minimum depth. The guidance is at least two feet of soil above, and at least a metre of clearance between the base of the grave and the top of the water table, with no standing water in the hole when it is dug. Digging past that does harm rather than good, which is the same lesson as latrine siting and for the same reason.
• Not where it will be built on or dug up.
• Record the location precisely. A description, a sketch, a measurement from two fixed points, and a location reference if any device still works. Sites become unfindable faster than anyone expects.
• Mark it. Something durable, with a name on it.
• Wrap the body, in whatever is available. This is for the people doing it as much as anything.
• Two people, not one, if that is at all possible.

And treat it as temporary. In most circumstances this will eventually be revisited by a family that wants a proper resting place, and a good record is what makes that possible.

Do something, however small

The parent page's line about communities that handle this with dignity holding together is the important one, and it is not sentiment.

Ritual is what makes a death survivable for the people left, and it does not require a professional, a building or a form of words anybody knows. Standing together for two minutes, saying the person's name out loud, letting each person say one thing, a marker with a name on it: that is enough, and it is enormously better than nothing.

Do it even when it feels inadequate. It always feels inadequate. The families who did something improvised and imperfect do better than the families who waited for circumstances that would allow something proper.

Include the children if they want to be included. Being excluded from a death in the family is usually worse for a child than being present, though that judgement belongs to the parent. The triage page makes the same point from the other direction.

The quiet ones

The parent page says watch the quiet ones and that is the most useful sentence in the module.

The people who are visibly distressed are being looked after. The risk sits with the person who is functioning, competent, busy, and saying very little. That is often the person who made the decisions, or who was present, or who is holding the household together.

• Give them a reason to talk that is not a request to talk. Working alongside somebody, in the dark, on a task, is when things get said.
• Ask twice. The first answer is always fine.
• Watch for the practical signs rather than the emotional ones: not eating, not sleeping, taking risks, working without stopping, drinking more, withdrawing from the room.
• Say the thing plainly. That it was not their fault, that the decision was made with what was known at the time, and that you would have done the same.
• Keep them in the routine. Meals, jobs, sleep, company. The parent page's list of routines, jobs, talking and the morale box is exactly right, and it is the treatment that is actually available.

Afterwards, and years afterwards

Grief in these circumstances is not a disorder and it is not weakness. It is a normal response to something abnormal, and it is treatable.

• It comes back. Anniversaries, seasons, smells, a song. That is normal and it is not a relapse.
• Children re-grieve as they grow, understanding it differently at seven than at four, and again at fourteen. Expect the questions to return and answer them again, honestly, at whatever age they are asked.
• Say it out loud to another adult. Silence is what turns this into something lasting.
• Take the help when it is available again, including for the person who seemed fine at the time. Distress following decisions made under impossible constraint is recognised, common, and responds to treatment.
• And keep the record. The paper written at the time is what allows a family, years later, to know what happened rather than to imagine it. That is the whole reason for the first section of this page.