It’s something they never teach you when you start a job: “here’s the photocopier, we do Friday drinks fortnightly, and this is the protocol should one of your colleagues die.”
Writing for The Billfold, Michael Hobbes describes the process when a colleague – someone with proximity, but not intimacy – passes away.
I stare at my keyboard for a second, type in my password, open Outlook. There’s the official announcement from our president, the meeting cancellations, the invite from comms to record memories of Colin.
“The next thing that happens is we are terrible”, he says.
And in Philadelphia magazine, Sandy Hingston looks at the decline of the funeral business.
A societal changeover from burial to cremation is momentous for our culture. It signals a cataclysmic shift in how we think about our bodies and ourselves. If we’re no longer preserving our remains for the glorious moment when the trumpet blares the Resurrection, does it matter what we do with them? What is the meaning of life, and death, once religion goes?
And maybe get some tissues for this last one: Gayatri Devi on The Art of Dying.
Seeing the buzzing around Jane lying prostate in bed, I felt myself on the set of the Ars Moriendi, the small medieval manual featuring eleven woodcuts on how to die the Good Death. The scenes are more crowded than the main floor of Barney’s at Christmas season, teeming with saints, devils and people.