To cease upon the midnight with no pain.” Keats, in his Ode to a Nightingale, “half in love with easeful death”, voiced the mortal wish of us all. The Government's proposed end-of-life care strategy to support people if they want to die at home is welcome and long overdue. What people dread and fear most is not death itself, but the pain and humiliation preceding it, in a strange place and among busy strangers.

But how typical of our Anglo-Saxon attitude that, as Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, told the BBC Today programme yesterday, other media had said that their audiences would find the subject of death “too depressing”.

Nonsense! The programme also featured Maria Gleeson, who had kept her terminally ill 51-year-old husband Paul at home - with advice from the local hospice - to die as he wanted, with his three daughters playing music all around him. It was uplifting to hear.

The majority of the population, those aged between 0 and 64, have lived unscathed by wars or epidemics of killer diseases that once carried people off overnight. Instead, most of us must watch the lingering demise of our nearest and dearest in hospitals. It is not a pretty sight, but it is inescapable. As Julian Barnes wrote in Nothing to be Frightened Of, his book about facing death: “Perhaps a sense of death is like a sense of humour... For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about.”

Times Archive, 1971: In the last days of life

In a great many cases it is not the will to care at home for the dying member of a family that is lacking but the means to do so

• Letter: Dying on the NHS

• Letter: Hospital care of the dying

• Letter: Health Service care for the dying patient

Related Links

• Case studies: Choosing to die at home

• End of Life Care: the key facts

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• The last days of life

The mantra of the late Dame Cicely Saunders, founder and guiding spirit of the pioneer hospice, St Joseph's at Sydenham, southeast London, was: “Let the patients speak.” She wanted to give the dying the space “to discover that they are who they are, and to know that it's not too late”. She regarded death by cancer (or anything with its own life sentence) as a great opportunity.

There is much to be said for knowing in advance that you will die in the foreseeable future. Most lives end in a mess of unfinished business - things left unsaid, letters (and wills) unwritten, rifts unhealed, love unexpressed. St Joseph's was the first hospice to offer home care, and most of its patients now do go to die at home, knowing that a rapid response team is on call night and day.

If such care were available everywhere, the euthanasia debate would simply die out. Both the hospice movement and the Voluntary Euthanasia Society share a single chief concern - the relief of suffering and the importance of dignity in death. Since palliative care became a recognised medical speciality in 1987, hospices are the next best thing to home. No gloom, no groaning inmates in rows of beds, but instead light and blithe calm.

Birth and death are our only universal experiences, but we accord the beginning of life far greater consideration than its end. The expectant mother's rights and preferences are discussed with her in advance. But the terminal patient needs just as much forethought. One of Mr Johnson's proposals is that patients should “let their wishes be known in advance”. In a hospice or at home, with pain and other symptoms under control, families can supply what is wanted - a birthday celebration, or a visit from a dog or cat.

One outpatient I met at St Joseph's, pouring champagne all round, said that she had written the poem to be read at her funeral. “I shall have the fourth movement from Mahler's Fifth, from the film Death in Venice, and I shall go out to the grand march from Aïda.”

I was reminded of Annie Lindsell, the 47-year-old motor neuron disease sufferer, who went to the High Court in 1997 to win the right to die when she chose, at home, looking out at her garden, surrounded by her friends and cats, with champagne and the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde “at full blast”.

It will be a good thing if we see an end to the traditional British way of dealing with death - to shy away from it, accepting the end with grim stoicism. Our Victorian mawkishness about death, and the love of deathbed scenes in literature, are long outgrown. Americans have now reached the state of mind where people think that they can live for ever, so widows are prone to outrage and disbelief: Joan Didion's remarkable book The Year of Magical Thinking, about the death of her husband and her daughter's illness, - now rivetingly dramatised, with Vanessa Redgrave, at the National Theatre - was the apotheosis of this view. But Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne, died at home, waiting for supper. Sudden death, without painful anticipation, is as good as death gets - for the corpse.

For the about-to-be-bereaved, we know that keeping dying relatives at home is the widely preferred solution, backed by advice on palliative care. The hospice movement, and excellent organisations such as Marie Curie and Macmillan Nurses, are widely appreciated for what they do - but it is anachronistic to expect them to depend so heavily on charity and volunteers. Can we afford universal palliative care for the dying? In our ageing society, we must. The way we deal with death is a reflection of the value that we place on human life.

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