Thirty deaths, essentially one a day … that’s the number of coroner’s cases I attended between the second of December and second of January.

They didn’t arrive in digestible one-a-day doses, mind you. Unanticipated deaths are by definition unanticipated, and tend to come in flurries. There were 3-4 day stints when my phone didn’t ring at all, followed by whirlwind days of four cases between breakfast and lunch.

But by the time I was done with the holiday rush and all the reports that went along with it, it was the busiest month I’d had since finishing residency … and quite possibly busier than a month or two of residency itself.

The benefit of being a doctor to the dead is that it provides time to reflect.