A few days ago, I was browsing LinkedIn, as I'm in a position where I'm looking for a change. As I doom scrolled through the feeds of my connections, it was confronting, and surprising to see a post from someone I didn't know (okay, they work at the same company where I am located) - reference a former colleague.
They stated that two days ago, a mutual colleague (whom I hadn't had a connection with on LinkedIn) had passed away after a long battle with illness.
Here's what it taught me about B2B Sales.
(That's a fucking joke, in case you don't understand that meme.)
This filled me with some measure of sadness, as while I never worked with this individual for more than a few weeks at a time on specific projects and enhancements, they were one of the brightest sparks of joy among the corporate culture. Any project with them on the team was refreshing from the banal corporate monotony.
They didn't have a background in business or the technology industry in which we were employed, but rather, like me, they had a background in Visual Art.
Therefore, between business related things, we'd regularly discuss art, inspiration, philosophy and other such themes. Not regularly enough, as I was not aware of the fact that this particular individual was unwell, or indeed near (or now, dead).
The language of tense and temporality becomes funny when you talk about survivorship and the expiry of human life. It is a struggle.
They weren't "old".
I don't remember them as frail or sickly.
They're just gone, and with them, a corporate culture now benefits less from an artist working within in.
There's a few others in the org who have a keen interest in the arts, and I'll be doing everything I can to try and let that creative thinking thrive to allow markedly different solutions to problems emerge.
It matters, and people matter too, so make sure you enjoy your time with them all. you never know when they'll be gone.
That is definitely one way to hear about death, though I feel also an increasingly common one (I don't know if I'm biased due to recent experience or just from memory as I've drifted through a few online communities and obviously that's the only way you ever find out sometimes).
Very sad that it was illness and not a ripe old age :<
Hope your encouragement and any markedly different solutions that emerge are accepted and welcomed.
Hopefully they will, but there's not much time left for that :) And that's okay (no, I'm not dying) - at least, not to my knowledge!