Today, death is marked by a paradoxical condition of absence and presence. People are hidden away in care homes or hospitals when they die. Professionals deal with death, making it invisible to non-professionals. At the same time, death is all around us via media images and popular cultural narratives. Whether in media reports from sites of war, televised royal funerals, gruesome murders in true-crime podcasts or fictional stories in films, death would seem to be everywhere. The pandemic also influenced our thinking about death.1 While the dead and dying were often even more separated from the living during this time – with care homes closed off and funerals limited to only a few people – death was very present in news reports, and online spaces provided new ways of mourning and remembering.2 Although this issue focuses on death, it is also concerned with life – as stories of death often are.25 The contributions all highlight that death, loss and mourning are fundamental aspects of being human, an insight often overlooked in contemporary cultures that tend to conceal death, which everyone must ultimately confront. Media and popular culture have a part to play in this encounter. But exactly what this role is – whether it provides comfort, disillusionment or perhaps more questions – varies according to social and cultural contexts as well as individual perceptions and preferences.