When the deceased come crashing into our lives without warning – at least three times in the average lifetime – they tend to shatter not just our routine, but our fragile sense of self. They fill us with sadness and loss, and sometimes capsizing grief, but they also mock all our earthly attempts to deny or ignore the truth that they – the suddenly, shockingly, unbelievably dead – convey: ‘As I am now, you too will be’. Death, to borrow one of Thomas Lynch’s favourite expressions, may just be another one of life’s many ‘unremarkable and verifiable truths’, but it is the final and irreversible one. That is why we are in such a state of collective terminal denial about it.

Or are we? Of late, there have been signs that we may be finally coming to terms, belatedly making some reluctant accommodation with eh great inevitable. In recent years, there has been a spate of best-selling books that have dealt with the intimate bonds between the living and the dying. Then there’s the recent cult success of Six Feet Under, the imported American television series set in a funeral home. It would certainly seem that a new realism, albeit an irony-tinged one, is being expressed towards death and dying in the popular arts.

More revealing still of our changing attitudes is the growing popularity of the alternative undertaker. On a Friday morning, I am on my way to another kind of funeral, a green one to be exact. I want to see, first hand, if a less sombre, more celebratory, ceremony will alter my own longstanding refusal to countenance, never mind plan, the manner of my own departing. I am being driven down to Hampshire by Roslyn Cassidy, a petite and engaging South African whom I met for the first time a week ago, and am quickly getting to know. In the back is John, whom I have never met before, and will never get to know. He is lying horizontally across the folded-down seats, encased head to toe in untreated pine.

My newfound familiarity with the dead is not making the journey seem any less surreal. The coffin is covered with a woven blanket so as not to startle passing lorry drivers or daydreaming motorists idling at a red light, but I keep wondering what will happen if we have to break suddenly.

Or if we crash. The dead, as Lynch attests, may not care, but they still matter, not least to their living loved ones. Our destination – John’s final one – is the South Downs Natural Burial Site, set in a 53-acre woodland area. There, in a simple, non-religious ceremony with only a handful of close friends and family in attendance, he will be laid to rest in his unvarnished, biodegradable coffin amid hawthorn, hazel and birch, hymned only by birdsong and the lowing of nearby cattle. Later, a tree of his family’s choosing will be planted on his grave.

This is the new, ecologically friendly face of death and dying; the funeral as an acknowledgement of our transient place in the natural world rather than a religious ritual marking our passing into the next one. It is a rapidly expanding industry.

‘We are fast becoming the local funeral directors’, Roslyn had told me earlier when I visited Green Endings, this bright and welcoming north London funeral service she runs. ‘Put simply, we offer more. People nowadays are used to choice in everything else so why not their own funeral?’ To this end, Green Endings does a brisk trade in biodegradable coffins made from bamboo, wicker (Adam Faith was buried in one) and cardboard. ‘Many of our clients aren’t that alternative, they just don’t want to feel restrained by the constraints and regulations of a traditional church ceremony. They want to say goodbye to a loved on in a more personalised way that befits that person’s life.’

The week before, Roslyn tells me, she oversaw a woodland funeral attended by two busloads of friends and family. They sang African songs instead of saying prayers, buried the body themselves, then partied around the grave long into the night on champagne and wine. ‘It seemed,’ she adds, smiling at the memory of a job well done, ‘so much healthier.’

It may appear, then, that as a society we are finally finding new, more open and more healthy ways to make the passing of our loved ones. Or maybe we are simply finding new ways to make the death of another seem more palatable to ourselves, to make the leave-taking a less final and less formal ritual. In the woods, it struck me that the question this kind of ceremony asks is not just what a funeral is for, but whom a funeral is for? Is it for the person in the box or the people standing beside it?

Or is it, as the funeral director knows more than anyone, some deftly executed accommodation of the two?

In his recent, provocative book Straw Dogs, the philosopher John Gray writes: ‘We deal with the death of a friend in much the same way we step aside to avoid a falling slate. We may be in doubt as to how to show our sadness or comfort others who have been bereaved, but if we succeed in doing so it is not because we have altered our beliefs or improved our reasonings. It is because we have learnt to cope with things more skilfully.’

Maybe, then we read the books and hold the parties not to find our more about death but simply to cope better with loss; to keep grief at bay, to stop the darkness echoing. And maybe, as Gray suggests, our time would be better spent listening to the darkness echoing, learning to live with it, or even in spite of it, but not pretending we do not hear it. There is as yet no evidence that a celebration assuages grief any more effectively than old-fashioned sombre leave-taking.

In death, as in life, though, you pays your money you takes your choice. (And it’s another of life’s verifiable truths that a funeral, whether traditional or alternative, will always cost more than you think, even, as is increasingly the case, when it has been paid for long before death. An English funeral costs £1,800 on average, more so in London, where a single grave can cost as much as £1,200.) There are 600,000 deaths a year in Britain and most of those bodies end up not in the ground but as ashes. Cremation is popular because it is cheaper and because it has been thrust on the public by local authorities. The shortage of inner city space to bury the dead has also helped the growth of green funerals, which often take place in woodland sites set aside by re4sourceful farmers no longer making money from tillage or grazing.

In the business of death and dying, the essentials don’t change. As the mobile sounds, there’s another job, maybe to the hospital or the mortuary or the terraced hosue stilled and stunned by the phone call they never expected to take, the bad news they never expected to hear. Roslyn Cassidy undertakes the job with diligence and enthusiasm, tending to the dead and more crucial even than that, taking care of the living who have been left behind.

There is a parable, recently re-told in a book about the Dalai Lama, in which a woman who has lost her only child asks the Buddha to restore him to life. He agrees to do this but tells her she must first go out and find hima handful of mustard seed coming from a house in which no-one has died. She fails in her quest, for she can find no home which death has not visited.

None of us wants to face the inevitable but death happens and over and above the shock and grief all of a sudden there are innumerable practical matters needing attention. The most pressing among them may well be finding an undertaken and perhaps tfor the first time arranging a funeral. Which way to turn? You cannot hang around, undecided. There are the obvious candidates to be found on a hospital or crematorium list, in the vicar’s diary or on a website, but many of us have a dread of men in black coats, of hardwood coffins, brass handles, pompous hearses and all the traditional paraphernalia of death.

I was lucky, if you can call it that, to have had two friends who quite independently recommended Green Endings. We rang the number and the same day were visited by Roslyn, a young woman in a smart grey trouser suit who instantly put us all at ease. She did not tell us what to do. There was no feeling of being on a conveyor belt. ‘We give you the funeral you want’ is part of their publicity and this is just what her company did.

We were offered coffins made of cardboard, unvarnished pine or plaited bamboo as well as a variety of conventional wooden models. We chose one of woven bamboo which turned out to be very beautiful as well as appropriate for a cremation, simple and environmentally friendly. When the day came and we saw the hearse arrive at the crematorium it was being driven by a very smart young woman, which prompted several of the family to comment upon how much Bill would have appreciated his chauffeur.

The only priest who would have understood our needs was in Texas so we decided to dispense with impersonal rituals and conduct our own service. Everyone present took part, family and friends concelebrating in a memorable and meaningful way.

Miranda, the organist a the East Finchley Crematorium, was another helpful and friendly young woman who, when we went to see her, somehow managed to produce every bit of music we suggested, including Toreador, to the sound of which we came out into the winter sunshine. Her contribution helped greatly to knit the hour into a coherent whole.

Throughout those few days nothing seemed too much trouble to Roslyn and her team. We changed our minds, sent faxes, asked questions, fussed about how the dread moment when the coffin disappears into the furnace could best be managed and never were we made to feel importunate or bothersome. In the end, the only thing we none of us could have planned was a two year old grand-daughter who, as the curtain closed, piped up, ‘Bye bye, Bill! Bye bye, Bill! Now let’s go outside.’ Few of us who were there will ever forget that moment.