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No one tells you that the hardest part of a funeral isn’t the cold weight of the dirt on the mahogany; it is the aggressive, uncaring blue light of a computer monitor three mornings later.
I am sitting in Conference Room B, and the air conditioning is humming at a frequency that feels like it’s trying to vibrates my teeth out of my skull. On the screen, a slide deck is detailing the Q4 projections for the Northeast corridor. There are 466 rows of data points, each one representing a human transaction, a metric achieved. My colleagues are debating the merits of a 6 percent increase in lead generation. Someone makes a joke about the coffee in the breakroom being a biohazard, and the room erupts into that polite, corporate laughter that sounds like dry leaves skittering across pavement. I stare at my laptop, my fingers hovering over the keys, trying to remember why I ever thought these numbers mattered. Three days ago, I was holding my mother’s hand as her breathing slowed to a rhythmic, terrifying silence. Now, I am supposed to care about the conversion rate of a landing page.
