Just before or sometime after you read this, a 21 car cortege will have carried the body of Jade Goody and her strange yet familiar circus of friends, family and publicists, from Bermondsey to Buckhurst Hill in Essex, passing across Tower Bridge, not far from the offices of The Times.

The arrangements have been handled by F.A. Albin and Sons, whose rootedness in London death may be surmised from the names of their four horses: Fred, George, Ronnie and Reggie. And Albin’s knows how to do these things; the passage from her origins to her suburban final destination had been designed to take Jade’s remains from crowd-lined streets in Southwark, to a service at St John's Baptist Church, with space for 350 people inside, an overspill for 200 in the church hall and a public address system relaying the service to still more people outside. There won’t, however, have been live television coverage of the event and the interment itself will have been private. Those left wanting something more of Jade (and there are many) can purchase - for “just” £3.99, from Candles by Laurence – “a limited edition memorial candle for the duel (sic) purpose of giving her many fans and well wishers a chance, not only to own their own Jade memorial, but also by their purchase, support Jade’s cancer charity initiatives. “

Cynicism comes as easily to a journalist as hyperbole - sometimes even in the same article. There is a small media industry to build a Goody-type phenomenon up and a slightly smaller one to lament that such a vulgarity exists at all - we might describe it as the war between Jade and the jaded. And the disputes between various parts of the Goody world about the timing and nature of the three posthumous memoirs and photorecords seems to provide evidence that none of this emotion is real and that all of it simply arises from that nexus of modern life, the “cult of the celebrity”.

Well, maybe, but despite all that it is certainly powerful. The day after Ms Goody’s death (on Mothering Sunday, should we have required any other emotional signposts), The Guardian headlined Jade as being “at peace”. This was a fairly remarkable piece of sentimentality; for the atheist Jade was simply dead, gone, neither “at peace” nor troubled; the agnostic would not know; a reincarnationist would think that it all depended. One would find no consensus over peace or otherwise – all we could agree about is that she was no longer alive.

But journalists also have to watch their publics, even if we don’t always understand them. One of the aspects of the Goody death that has fascinated me has been the way in which the comments sections in our online editions of The Times have been used as a sort of one-way communion point between contributors and the dying or dead woman. Even if the story has been, say, the dispute over publishing, many of the comments have used it as an opportunity to address Jade directly, as in “Dear Jade, Rest in Peace England’s real rose. You were so beautiful, and always said things how they should be said. You deserve to have such a happy after life playing with all the angels in heaven. Goodnight babes, sweet dreams.” And that is not at all untypical.

As the writer John Lahr puts it, “when the heart speaks, it speaks kitsch”. Even so these verbal bouquets confuse those who were also confused by the reaction, over a decade ago, to Princess Diana, and who were inclined to attribute the cellophane mountains and the weeping for the unmet celebrity, as a mixture of hype and hysteria. Or play-acting. As Hamlet asked of the actor’s tears, what is he to Hecuba or Hecuba to him that he should weep for her?

Then there’s the feeling of resentment to being co-opted into someone else’s show of grief; of effectively being told by others what to feel, and how to express it. When “a nation grieves” it discombobulates those who, while part of the nation, don’t grieve, possibly because they don’t care much for princesses or watch reality TV, or because they simply prefer not be members of clamorous but transitory clubs. When Prime Minister’s Question Time was suspended a few weeks ago because of the death of David Cameron’s son, Ivan, there were those who criticised MPs for failing to carry on and do their duty, for giving way to sentiment.

They seemed to see a kind of creeping softness that was contaminating public life. But surely something else is going on, and I suppose one could give it the title, The Reclamation of Death. After several decades, maybe more, banished to the margins of our consciousness (but never from our unconscious!) death is back.

In his recent book The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, the psychoanalyst, Darian Leader, theorised about how we deal with extinction – both our own and that of people we are close to. He pointed out that, historically, the very image of stoicism in the face of death – the veiled Jackie Kennedy at her husband’s graveside – was anomalous, and yet had become our model. The wartime generation – the Great Generation- was buried without tears. Jackie, in the words of Harriet Schiff, “set mourning back 100 years”.

Such withheld emotion was always going to be attractive to the British middle classes, with its obsession with privacy and its concern for appearance. When, in the lat 60s, Jessica Mitford returned to Britain to examine its funerary culture for a chapter in her book The American Way of Death, she characterised the middle classes as saying, “it’s all unpleasant, let’s get it over”. She found a country that was trying to minimise its contact with dying. Before the war, for example, a death would mean that, in 90% of cases the body would lie for a while in the house. By the sixties that was down to 10%. Four-fifths of Britons were dying in hospital (that proportion has almost certainly increased) and the average attendance at a funeral was six or seven, or as funeral directors put it, “a car and a half”. Many Britons had never been to a funeral at all.

Increasingly more showy death and funeral rituals were seen by Britons as being unnecessarily distressing or hopelessly vulgar. We eschewed the open coffin, the wake and the plumed horses as being fit for the superstitious or the gangsters. Mitford’s book demonstrated to us, not the privatization and diminution of mourning, but the regrettable tastelessness of the Americans, the people who could produce radio jingles that went, to the tune of Rock of Ages, “If your loved one has to go, Call Columbus 690.”

This, I think, is changing. Perhaps it is because the baby-boomer generation, which has never done anything quietly, from teenage years, through child-rearing and retirement, now confronts death in its noisy and up-front fashion. It leads a new discussion on assisted dying because it wants to control, if it can, the manner of its departure. It is moving from thirtysomething to dyingsoon, and chronicling its passage in cancer memoirs. It plans its funeral music with the same pleasure that it took in its weddings; it wears pictures of its lost lovers on tee-shirts worn at the London marathon; it discusses the possibility of “living funerals” – pre-death parties, like the incredible one that – ten years ago – we held for my father. How critical can I be, then, of the OK magazine Jade Goody Official Tribute Issue,1981-2009 being published days before her death?

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