Death and dying: The last taboo

"DEATH and dying are arguably our last taboos," argues the introductory text of the thought-provoking Life Before Death exhibition currently on at the Wellcome Collection.

With most deaths occurring at a distance from our everyday lives - usually in hospices - the exhibition notes that "opportunities to learn more about them are rare indeed."

With Life Before Death, photographer Walter Schels and journalist Beate Lakotta, both based in Hamburg, attempt to bring this important subject into the light.

After accompanying 26 people who were terminally ill and very close to death, from an 18-month-old baby to an 83-year-old man, Schels has produced two black-and-white photographic portraits of each person - the first taken before death, the second shortly after.

Accompanying these sombre head-shots is a short text compiled by Lakotta about the dying person's life, including their most intimate thoughts in their last moments.

Walking around the sparse exhibition space, it is the portraits - never smiling and often showing faces full of fear, resentment, anger and resignation - that initially catch the eye.

However, it is the dying person's testimony that is most memorable, drawing attention to how each person approaches the last stage of their life in their own way.

Although it sounds like a Hollywood cliche, each person's closeness to death seems to have given them a moment of clarity and honesty that one rarely sees in other life stages.

As a life-long member of the Protestant church, 67-year-old Edelgard Clavey believes that "Death is a test of one's maturity. Everyone has to go through it on their own. I want very much to die."

Clavey's pre-destined certainty and acceptance is not held by many of the 25 other people in the exhibition. Dying of cancer, 68-year-old Gerda Strech laments: "All my life was nothing but work, work, work. Does it have to happen now? Can't death wait? I'm just so frightened. I don't even know whether I'll be going to heaven or hell."

Even more heartbreakingly, middle-aged Roswitha Pacholleck says of her life: "I didn't achieve anything. I have nothing to show for my life."

She continues: "It's absurd really. It's only now I have cancer that, for the first time, I really want to live."

Pacholleck's testimony sums up the exhibition - often unbearably sad, sometimes shocking, but never without hope and ultimately a celebration of life.

As 57-year-old Wolfgang Klotzahn, dying of inoperable bronchial carcinoma, explains: "I'm lying here waiting to die, but each day that I have I saviour, experiencing life to the full ... suddenly everything matters."

Judging by the solemn concentration of visitors and the life-affirming notes left in the exhibition's comments book, it is clear that I was not the only person to be profoundly moved by Life Before Death.

Exhibition is free and runs until May 18.