Death is, perhaps, the ultimate test which we face as patients, relatives and members of the caring professions. All of us have to cope with it and, no matter how experienced we become, the coping is seldom easy. Death is often a loss but it can also be a time of peaceful transition. It may represent failure or success, ending or beginning, disaster or triumph. We may try to improve our ways of caring but, whatever the circumstances, death must never become routine.

In recent years, the psychological care of the dying and the bereaved has improved greatly, largely thanks to the work of the Hospices and the various organizations, such as Cruse – Bereavement Care, which provide counselling to the bereaved. Hospices have always seen the unit of care as being the family, which includes the patient, rather than the patient with the family as an optional extra to be taken on if we have time.

The field is a large one and it will not be possible, in the space available here, to give more than an outline of some of the major issues or to review the scientific and clinical research which underlies the theory and practice which I shall describe. The interested reader will find this type of information in the books by Kauffman (2002) and by Kissane and Bloch (2002), also in my own books, Parkes (1996) and Parkes and Markus (1998).