I heard my second cuckoo of the season today, a faint call of spring in the distance blended with more urgent sounds of the resident song thrush and honking grey lag goose. Life is making itself known in West Oxfordshire and it is very welcome. My feelings about new-born lambs are known, but I also love the cute wasps who return every year to strip the wood cladding from our new extension for their nests and the first signs of midges dancing in the sunlight. Despite past reservations about the stuff, I now celebrate the haze of cow parsley drifting through our garden and the surrounding hedgerows and I am trying to cultivate a similarly tolerant attitude towards stinging nettles. Life is good, in all its forms and May really showcases the stuff.

Which is why it might feel odd that the charity Hospice UK earmarks early May as its Dying Matters Awareness Week. When all of nature around us is bursting with beginnings, they ask us to pause and consider what happens at the end. Dying, death and bereavement have no season, of course. On the brightest, warmest, most pollen-filled day, someone we know will be encountering their own mortality or experiencing bereavement or thinking about a walk they once took with a friend who is no longer around. Every time I hear a cuckoo I think about Grandad and the notebook he kept to track first sightings and harkenings in the pattern of the year. If I ever walk past a clump of lily in the valley, I smile and picture the side plate I inherited from Gran, featuring a delicate image of her favourite spring flower. When I pull on my ancient walking boots, caked with dried mud and held together by dusty laces, I remember Mum.

Walking can be a part of honouring the dead and managing grief, as well as connecting to memories of people we miss. A favourite walk once shared can act as a continuing bond, a way of communing with the absent. It can set scenes for moments of recollection - that’s the spot we used to stop for a picnic; this is the view they loved; there’s the dodgy stile they used to grumble about; here’s the part where we always seemed to get lost.

Walking, especially in the bountiful month of May, can help us recognise what it means to be alive, to experience the joyful, chaotic, noisy fragility of our world.

If you’re out walking with friends or family this weekend, you might like to mention Dying Matters. Side-by-side conversation is a good chance to start talking about what is still often a taboo subject. Here are some questions you might like to use:

• How would you describe your perfect day right now? How might this change if you knew you had limited time left to live? What is important to you at the moment, what is not important?

• What are you most proud of?

• What advice would you like to pass on to others?

• How would you like to be remembered?

• What words would you use to talk about the end of life, dying, and death?