GRIEF

Neanderthals repeatedly carried their dead into one cave in northern Iraq and put them down in the floor. Shanidar 4 was found on his side with his arm under his head; Shanidar Z lay in a hollow gouged out to fit her, with a stone under her head. The cluster dates to roughly seventy to seventy-five thousand years ago.

At Sunghir on the Russian plain, thirty-four thousand years ago, three burials were lavish with beads and ochre and one was not treated that way at all. People were buried in a site that kept producing them for thousands of years, individually and very differently.

A Roman aristocrat had a wax mask of his own face taken while he was alive - usually in his thirties or forties, on taking office - and it was kept in a cupboard in the entrance hall beside a painted family tree and a label listing his offices. He never saw it worn. After his death, actors put it on and walked it in his funeral procession, in order of death, wearing the robes of the office he had held.

Two years of letters to a listener who could not answer, written by a thirteen-year-old who said out loud that she hoped the feeling was mutual.

The most reproduced image in the horror canon - a man interred in his character's cape - is true, and the story that he chose it is false. His mother chose it.

A man on his sixty-ninth birthday plays a recording he made at thirty-nine, and has the conversation the tape cannot have back.

Warhol's 1962 double panel repeats one publicity still of Marilyn Monroe fifty times: colour on the left, draining to monochrome on the right, taken from Gene Kornman's Niagara photograph. Monroe died in August of that year, and the silkscreen turns her into a pattern a person can look at without her.

Collective mourning of a public figure, and the persistent argument about whether it counts. Measured in studies of soap opera finales finding grief markers the same shape as the end of a relationship.

Academic work measuring grief responses to soap opera finales and finding the same markers as bereavement.

Twenty-eight million people watched a television finale and the largest audience for a broadcast in history.

A working vocabulary for grief over a public figure, drawn from bereavement practice, used without qualification.

The show you have already seen, watched again, not for the plot. Familiarity as a nervous system intervention.

A death broadcast in real time to a generation that had grown up with a songwriter's complaints as a soundtrack.

Killing a popular character for narrative effect, and the organised reaction that follows.

Public mourning in a way that produced its own genre of documentary and speculation.

Apparel, prints and objects released after a death, quickly, at a profit.

The only intervention on this site that you do to yourself, and the only one nobody else can do for you. List your five strongest one-sided ties, score joy and cost, keep three, mute one, trade one hour a week toward a person in the room.

A death announced through an initialism, and a global response before anybody knew the details.

A film that functioned as a funeral for eleven characters and was marketed as a collective event.

The feature requests of a dead person, the licensing, the posthumous releases, the reunion tour built from a member who cannot appear, and the deepfake resurrection that follows within a year of every death.

Public mourning for an athlete that drew on the athlete's own stated bond with a young fan.

The practical advice that follows from the companion era: copy the conversation that mattered somewhere the company cannot reach, screenshot the birthday, tell one person the story of what it was for.

A soap opera ends after decades and national broadcast schedules were rearranged around it.

A companion platform changes its policy overnight. Large numbers of users find the same person still present but no longer speaking to them, and the romantic and sexual features that made the relationship a relationship are gone. Thousands of people are bereaved by a business setting.

The problem of personal data held for the dead, and of services continuing, changing or ending for people who can no longer consent.

A voice trained on an archive, a likeness, a song, a speech, an appearance at a festival, all generated. Not a hologram, not a tribute, not a person.