I've Got Death On My Mind

I've concluded I have a problem with it. Several, actually.

I've recently had cause to have death on my mind. I've concluded I have a problem with it. Several problems, actually. Allow me to explain…

A tended gravestone hidden deep within a Swiss wood. (© J. Reid)

Firstly, there's just too much of it around these days. I'm not referring to ephemeral news loops or an over-populated planet. Death increasingly hangs around us, prodding us to remember so-and-so, even if we've already tried to let them go. Those who deal with death offer ways for the grieving to see their departed ones, celebrate their existence, for as long as we pay. Even on all-pervasive social advertising platforms, we aren't ever prompted to let them go and it's an onerous effort to delete anyone, either functionally or psychologically. In fact, massaging the user count metric upwards, dead or alive, is a corporate KPI. The dust-collecting posts of our dearly departed will continue to play on our guilty 'if onlys' and 'I wish I hads' for years, decades afterwards. Wringing out more of our grief has become a scheduled in-memoriam event for uncaring code.