Environmental funerals are on the up – but are they really as sustainable as their providers say?

“I want to become a pearl when I die - or a reef,” said Madeleine Sutcliffe. Aged 80 and suffering from lung cancer, Sutcliffe was given six months to live in January.

Adam, Sutcliffe’s son, is enthusiastic. “I don’t think a pearl is possible but if mum’s ashes are made into an artificial reef , I’ll be able to dive to it,” he said. “Given how I feel when I dive - serene, calm and meditative - a reef is the perfect environment to remember mum.”

Andrew Gwynne and Paul Foster express concerns about safeguards as growing number of MPs change stance on bill

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Two more Labour MPs have expressed significant doubts about the assisted dying bill, suggesting they would now oppose the legislation.

The former health minister Andrew Gwynne, who previously abstained, wrote to his constituents in Gorton and Denton to say: “To date I don’t think that the bill has been strengthened enough and that safeguards should go much further.”

UK company offers alternative to land-based burials after success of memorials in Bali made from remains of pets

Death is killing our planet. That is the stark assessment of a new business offering an innovative alternative: to have your loved one’s ashes made into a reef and anchored to the British seabed.

There are increasing concerns about the environmental cost of traditional funerals: a single burial generates 833kg of CO ₂ , while a typical cremation has a footprint of about 400kg CO ₂ .

I felt peace flood over me as I realised I no longer needed to seek validation from others. Rather than saying yes to everything, I became more open, present and patient

‘Are you afraid of dying, or are you afraid of not living?” Last year, I was sitting in a circle of strangers – half Buddhist monks, half morbidly curious members of the public – when someone asked one of the most profound questions I had ever heard. I was at a “death cafe”, at my local Buddhist centre in south London. A plate of biscuits was passed around while people nursed mugs of hot tea. At 29, I was one of the youngest attending the informal chat about death and dying, which was part of an initiative to encourage more open conversations about the ends of our lives.

During the session, people reflected on the lives of those they had lost. Stories were shared about the joyful moments they had had together. A woman asked me why I would want to come to something like this, at my age. I looked around before revealing more than I had ever told my own friends and family.

Zara Zerny’s lucid and compassionate study gathers moving, candid interviews with bereaved partners remembering their lost loves

The Marvel bromide about “What is grief, if not love persevering?” comes to mind watching this metaphysically charged Danish documentary in which nine senior citizens discuss their departed life partners. Director Zara Zerny works hard in defining the miracle of lifelong companionship, and the ineffable essence of that significant other which persists after death. So much so that, in one final, oddly encouraging section, some of the interviewees here suggest that their loved one still watches over them, Patrick Swayze-style.

Awkward beginnings and lovestruck thunderclaps: it’s all here. Finn-Erik recalls his first sighting of Kirsten as a 17-year-old with ballet-dancer grace. Ove was rescued from a hotel-room orgy with multiple Norwegians by strapping six-footer Bent, who tells him: “You’re coming home with me.” Then there’s Elly, the trauma of whose first violent marriage “vanished like the dew before the sun” when she met her new partner Aksel. In Zerny’s intimate interviewing environment, nothing is off the table: sex and infidelity, domestic bliss and disaffection, partnerships that outlast passion, the pain of outlasting your partner.

Letters sent by broadcaster and MPs with medical backgrounds call for action to change law

Esther Rantzen has urged all MPs to back Kim Leadbeater’s “strong, safe, carefully considered bill” to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales, which faces its next Commons test on Friday.

In an impassioned letter, the broadcaster, who has stage-four lung cancer , said she and other terminally ill adults asked MPs to allow “a good, pain-free death for ourselves and those we love and care for”.

Proponents say the measures being debated in parliament will apply only to people who are on their deathbeds. That isn’t true

You’ve been deceived by the campaign for assisted dying. It has told you who the proposed law is for: people on their metaphorical deathbeds, no hope in sight, desperate to spare themselves and their loved ones the experience of an agonising death. And no wonder – these cases obviously merit sympathy and concern. These are the people campaigners want to talk about; this is the narrative that pushes people into unquestioning support for their cause.

But what of the people the law would include who they don’t want you to consider? Proponents keep saying that the bill is tightly drawn to exclude disabled people, because it limits eligibility to those with only six months to live. But this is patently false. The line between disability and illness – a line this bill relies on – is not a sharp distinction. It is blurry, ever-moving and dependent on social factors far more than biological ones. This knowledge complicates the simple narrative the pro campaign is reliant on.

Lucy Webster is a political journalist and the author of The View from Down Here: Life As a Young Disabled Woman

With two others moving to vote in favour, and a previous majority of 55, the bill seems likely to pass next stage

At least five MPs who previously abstained on the assisted dying bill have decided to vote against it at its next stage in the commons, the Guardian understands.

The shift by a number of previously absent or undecided MPs towards voting against it has led to some concern among proponents of Kim Leadbeater’s bill, which would allow an assisted death for those with a terminal illness with less than six months to live .

From Samuel Pepys to Joan Didion, many literary greats wrote for no one but themselves – then found posterity pawing through their secrets. Trust me: you don’t want to know my innermost thoughts

A few years ago, a friend asked me to be her “literary executor”. We were both, I think, tickled by the grandiose sound of it, as if I would be playing off competing bids from the Bodleian and the New York Public Library for her juvenilia and early drafts (she is not actually primarily a writer). What she wants, though, is quite serious: I am to destroy her diaries when she dies.

That is because they aren’t meant for anyone’s eyes but her own. Whatever is in there (I don’t know, didn’t ask), it was never meant for public consumption. Many diarists feel that way: Sheila Hancock wrote about destroying decades’ worth of hers: “Maybe this vicious, verging-on-insane woman is the real me, but if it is I don’t want my daughters to find out.”

Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist