Death and Industry

Yesterday I wrote an obituary. It was for my Uncle Larry, who died on Thursday, a few weeks short of his 88th birthday. He’d been sick for a long time, and his death wasn’t a surprise. I spent much of the day with him, as he was dying, with my Aunt Tanya. Being with a person who is dying is a very specific experience. This is not the first time I’ve done it. The labored breathing, referred to by most people as a death rattle, and by medical workers as Cheyne-Stokes respiration is one of those sounds you recognize when you hear it, viscerally, in your animal brain, like the sound of a big earthquake. A friend in California told me once you can hear an earthquake coming. I couldn’t imagine what the sound would be like, until I heard it, in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. I knew exactly what it was, in my body, the sound like a train boring through the earth at impossible speed from my right, just before everything started pitching like a ship in a storm. The death rattle is like that, you know it when you hear it, it echoes through our collective memory. I write and think and talk about how we work, how we can work better. I work. But being that close to death is a bracing reminder of the realities we hide from. Life ends. No one, on their deathbed, wishes they spent more time at the office. Listen for more Get full access to Fierce Grace at speirolo.substack.com/subscribe