“In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” Benjamin Franklin once quipped. If some scientists and businessmen are to be believed, Franklin’s assertion is now only half true. For the sum of $200,000, you can pay to have your whole body saturated in antifreeze and placed in a giant refrigerator in Scottsdale, Arizona. (To shave down the price to $80,000, you can let your flesh rot and preserve your brain alone.) So far, around 1,000 people have signed up for the service in the hope that they will one day be defrosted to live a second life.

Whenever I hear of these schemes, I can’t help but think of Jessica Mitford, who died 20 years ago. The sister of the novelist Nancy Mitford, she was by turns a communist rebel, investigative journalist, civil rights activist and pop singer, opening a gig for Cyndi Lauper and recording a duet with the writer Maya Angelou. The author JK Rowling admired Mitford so much she even named her first daughter after her.

But it is for Mitford’s 1963 book The American Way of Death that she should be remembered today. An unsentimental (and often gruesome) examination of the extravagant and bizarre ways we cope with mortality, its message is more pertinent today than ever before.

‘Running-away account’

Decca, as she was known to her family and friends, was born to Lord and Lady Redesdale in 1917. The sixth of seven children, Decca’s dissatisfaction with her aristocratic life emerged at an early age: at just 12 years old, she was already planning her escape by establishing a ‘running-away account’ at the family bank.