'How old are you Nana?", asked my grandson just before Christmas.

"Sixty-one", I said. "But in a few weeks I'll be 62".

Say that to an adult and you'd probably get: "Oh, I can't believe you're that old! You don't look it!" Four year olds don't go in for insincerity.

"Then you'll die," he said. His dad, listening in the next room, exploded with laughter.

It's all perfectly logical. When people are old, they die. And 62 is very, very old, if you're only four. Though I did point out to him that his great-gran, my mother, is still going strong at 89, so death at 62 is not quite inevitable.

Of course, death is as unreal to small children as old age. Our grandson is fortunate not to have lost anyone close to him. I hope that's the case for a long time yet, though one day, inevitably, it will happen, in the normal course of things. If all goes as we'd like, it will be a case of we - his respective grandparents - reaching the natural end of long lives. Death in such circumstances, though it doesn't necessarily diminish the initial grief, is to be expected and is somehow acceptable, right even.

Not only has our grandson not learned yet about tact, neither does he realise what a taboo subject death is. For most of us, it's something to be resolutely avoided, even in thought, unless it's forced upon us in some cruel way.

It hasn't always been like this. In earlier times, when life expectancy was far shorter than it is today, what would to us be minor illnesses often carried off the young. To live to old age was the exception rather than the norm, so even toddlers would have had only too close an experience of death. It was a part of life, not something shut away and never mentioned, a subject to be avoided at all costs. A 'good death' was welcomed by the religious. Young and old generally died at home, in bed, with their families around them. After death, the corpse would be laid out in the front parlour for friends to visit when they came to pay their respects and offer condolences. This still occasionally happens, but it's very rare. How many people under the age of 40 have ever seen a dead body?

I'm not saying we should become obsessed with death. And it's a cause for thankfulness that so many once-fatal diseases have been overcome, that so few of us die young, that old age is so much the norm that it's becoming a problem for society. And there are some areas in which that ultimate taboo is confronted - in the wonderful hospice movement, for instance; even perhaps in the current controversy over euthanasia.

What is good is that, more and more often, funeral services are serving a dual purpose - as a means of offering spiritual comfort by ritualising grief; and as a celebration of the life of the person who's died.

For whether or not we believe in an afterlife, what matters is how our lives have been lived, the memories we leave behind, the happiness we have brought to others, the things that made us, essentially, what we were that will live on when our bodies have disappeared in dust or ashes. The one thing that's certain if we allow ourselves to confront death instead of evading it, is that we will quickly realise how precious life is, how every moment matters