It’s 5pm on a Wednesday afternoon and I’m sat in a wardrobe with a funeral planner and a death doula, listening to a story that’s giving me goose bumps.

“One of the most powerful funerals I ever did was for a girl my age who went to bed and just never woke up,” Louise Winter, the funeral planner, is telling me.

“We were quite similar, her and I, and had similar taste in our friendship groups. It could have been my funeral. It could have been my parents in the front row. I could have gone to bed and never woken up.

“She didn’t have a tomorrow and she had absolutely no idea.”

At this, there’s a pause. It’s an extraordinary story, and one that has packed its intended punch.

Over the next hour and a half I will hear a number of similar tales, as Winter and her collaborator, a death doula named Anna Lyons, help me understand how working with death has taught them to appreciate life.

I’m meeting the pair at their first exhibition, Life, Death, Whatever, and it’s full of so many people we’ve had to take refuge in a wardrobe at the top of the building. I’m surprised there’s such an appetite for death – there are whole families wandering around the space below us – but both Winter and Lyons, who met on Twitter in 2015, are keen to educate people on this great unknown.

Life lessons from working with death