Death and money

“When he’d died, I didn’t like people saying ‘Oh, he’s passed’. Or ‘You’ve lost your dad,’ as though I’d let go of his hand in the supermarket.”

That was Simon Armitage, the Poet Laureate, speaking on Radio 4 about the sudden death of his father.

In preparation for writing this article, I googled why people say “passed away” instead of “died”, and this is what came back: “People say ‘passed away’ because it’s a gentler euphemism used to soften the harshness of death.”