In Remembrance

Hey there,

This week's article is a departure from my usual topics. I'm not talking about AI at all, but I'll be back to the usual subject matter in the next issue, two weeks from now. Rather, this week, I'm writing about something that's been weighing on me since last Saturday, and I wanted to write about it and share it with you all while it still felt important.

I was looking someone up on LinkedIn for an entirely ordinary reason. Her name was Jenny Wilson, an art consultant at an auction house who helped me sell off my dad's art collection after he passed away. I hadn't spoken with her in years and wanted to see where she'd landed.

What I found instead was a banner across the top of her profile: "In remembrance." A line underneath explained that the account had been memorialized as a tribute to her professional legacy. She'd died in late 2024, just thirty-nine years old.

I've had more of my own unexpected losses than I'd like in the last several years, enough that I've attended several Death Cafe events, a room full of strangers trying to talk plainly about death instead of around it. I didn't think there was much left that could catch me off guard about how we handle it. This did.

Not because Jenny had died. Because of where and how I found out.

As a platform, LinkedIn had two real options for handling when a member dies: delete the account, or build something like Facebook's memorial pages, where friends keep posting, commenting, remembering out loud. It did neither. What it does instead is lock the account. The job history stays, the posts stay, the recommendations stay. Nobody can message it, connect to it, or write anything new on it. There's no legacy contact you can name in advance the way you can on Facebook. The decision of what happens to the account, memorialize it or close it, belongs to whoever can produce estate paperwork, usually months later. The profile isn't deleted and it isn't a memorial. It's just frozen, mid-sentence, and left there.

I don't think that's a design flaw so much as a design gap. LinkedIn is built entirely for forward motion. Every feature assumes the person behind the profile is still accumulating something: a role, a skill, an endorsement, a "next chapter." It even absorbs retirement into that logic. Nobody posts "ending my career today." They post "excited to start this new chapter," thirty-five years summarized as a launchpad instead of a landing. The platform has a fluent, practiced vocabulary for every kind of ending, as long as the person is still there to write the caption.

Death is the one ending nobody gets to narrate for themselves, and it turns out that's the one ending the platform has no language for at all. So it does the only thing it knows how to do with something it can't spin as momentum. It goes quiet.

I noticed this on LinkedIn because that's where it happened to me, but the same gap exists inside most companies I've worked with and for. They're fluent in growth: promotions, wins, milestones, the quarterly highlight reel. What they don't have a vocabulary for is a founder stepping back, a senior partner's health forcing an early exit, a firm quietly built around one person's reputation figuring out what happens when that person is no longer the one carrying it. Those things tend to get treated like glitches in the narrative instead of what they actually are: the parts of running an organization that were always going to happen eventually, to everyone, whether the story has room for them or not.

A family business consultant my dad and I worked with once told me about a founder who did something about that gap directly. Once or twice a year, with no warning, he'd walk into the office and tell the receptionist, "I just died." Then he'd sit down and watch. The company would spring into action, rehearsing exactly what it would do if its founder and CEO actually had.

I've always found that story fascinating. It's an extreme example, to be fair, most founders aren't going to stage their own death in the lobby. But it's one of the clearest cases I know of a business actually preparing for something unexpected and, at the same time, completely unavoidable. Most organizations treat those two qualities, unexpected and unavoidable, as a reason to look away. He treated them as a reason to rehearse.

The painting at the top of this issue is the last one my dad was working on when he died. I named it "Unfinished," appropriately.

I don't have a tidy takeaway to hand you here, and I'm not sure I want one. What I keep coming back to is a smaller question, worth sitting with on your own: what does your organization's story have no language for yet, and what happens the day it shows up anyway.

Break a Pencil,

Michael

www.breakapencil.com

P.S. If you've run into your own version of this, a platform, a system, a company culture that had no words ready for something everyone eventually goes through, I'd genuinely like to hear it. Just hit reply.

P.P.S. Same goes if you've seen an organization get caught flat-footed by a sudden change it never planned for. I'd like to hear that too.