Introduction: Innovation at the end of life

It is an exciting time to be working in death studies. With more generations living simultaneously than any time in human history, there is an ever-growing awareness of mortality. Death during old age is increasingly the dominant form of death around the world, placing ever more pressure on families and services to support ageing and dying amongst individuals (see for example Teggi, 2018 ). The recent COVID pandemic and growing climate concerns have also brought with them a renewed focus on loss, both human and environmental, physical and virtual. Around the world rituals and expectations around dying, death and its aftermath are changing as a result of multifarious factors, including individualism, commercialisation, secularism, materialism, neo-liberalism and more ( Walter, 2020 ).