For something which cannot be known nor spoken of nor represented, death is the subject of an enormous amount of talk. Death has its own literary, artistic and musical forms – the elegy, dirge, threnody, monody and epitaph, the death march and the requiem, the death mask, the photograph; its own psychic states – mourning and melancholia, introjection and internalisation; its own celebration – funeral, wake, memorial service; its own clichés – ars longer, vita brevis, memento mori, ‘you only live once’, ‘life's too short…’; its own euphemisms – some of them listed by Coleridge in a translation of the German ‘Sterben’: ‘to die, decease, depart, depart this life, starve, breathe your last, expire, give up the ghost, kick up your heels, tip off, tip over the Perch’ (CN I. 350); its own social rituals – the burial service, letters of condolence, visits, mourning customs; its own wardrobe – shroud, armband, black tie, widow's weeds; its own furniture and architecture – the urn, casket, coffin, the tomb, monument, grave and cenotaph; its own places – the hospital, hospice, funeral garden, cemetery, graveyard, crypt; its own crafts – the wreath, tombstone, funerary sculpture; its own legal forms – inquest, death certificate, post mortem or autopsy; its own experts – the coroner, pathologist, thanatologist, theosophist, medium, poet, undertaker, embalmer, priest, theologian.