I wouldn't have thought of humour as a coping mechanism for the bereaved. It comes more from the objective / collective sense (hence Folklore) of experience - and whilst, in this case at least, it would at least appear to have a subjective focus, what we actually see is a mythologised celebrity figure many times removed from the corporeal. Indeed, I noticed in passing that the Daily Star headline on Saturday referred to her as Dying Jade Goody - just to remind us, no doubt. Thus our feelings are part of the common hysteria, lacking the intimate focus of actual bereavement, rather like the mass outpourings we saw after the death of Princess Diana when the nation grieved as one; I swear I saw life-long anarchists weeping. In many ways it comes down to the old life goes on thing, the evident conundrum of which we find at the heart of Auden's Funeral Blues. For whom exactly does life go on? Certainly not for the bereaved, and yet, sure enough, there it is; life going on, inevitably, with death stalking us at every turn, and at whatever remove.

There are times in our lives we might laugh at such things; there are most certainly times when we won't. We've all been there; we all will be there too. It's impossible to to a imagine life - any life - without it; a life with love at its heart becomes all the more precious. Anything vile will attract humour; from cancer to paedophilia - neither of which are laughing matters in and of themselves. The humour is by way of both containment and diminishment, much as the comics made humorous figures of Hitler and Goebbels during the war; much as folk tales do with the personification of Evil & Death into entities which we might then confront, and even defeat, although in Duncan Williamson's Death and the Nut, there is the natural order to consider!

Thus is life once more realigned; are lives are enriched by love, destroyed by loss; though we might emerge to live, and love, again. But once we're gone that's it. You're a long time dead, as they say. I wonder - maybe for those of us with no religion perhaps these things take on a slightly different hue...