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January 08, 2004
Bring out your dead
Everyone handles death a different way. While this may seem like a lead-in to talk about the way people handle grief, it's not. It's really about something specific, which I'm only going to refer to vaguely.
This morning, I received a memo under mysterious circumstances--mysterious insofar as I don't normally receive memos, so it was pretty out of the ordinary--that informed me that one of my colleagues had been "found dead" at home.
With wording like that, speculation was rampant throughout the day, though always at lowered voice levels. Everyone had their opinions, many of the gravitating toward a couple of possibilities. Somehow, that seemed acceptable. It was okay to speculate, given the circumstances. It wasn't the most comfortable place to be, but it wasn't so bad.
What surprised me about all of this, though, was that I honestly felt better about the whole situation when the man's fate was left to speculation, rather than concretely revealed to us in a late-afternoon email.
Now I feel bad. There was a level of separation in the abstraction and, in that, there was comfort. Clearly there are others around here that knew him better than I and it feels weird to be "outside" of the commiserating. I feel cold, like I should be able to sigh and bring up memories or something and lament his passing, but ultimately one thing sticks in my mind: I didn't know the man and had no connection to him. Anything I could possibly say would feel very generic and empty and, for some strange reason, I feel like I should be able to offer something more. It could be something comforting or insightful, perhaps, but that is not to be.
I have nothing.
Posted by KinCross at January 8, 2004 06:05 PM