When executives die, people speak about them in one voice. Visionary. Builder. Left a mark. The sentences are ready long before the funeral.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Amaranta is told she will die on the day her shroud is finished. From then on her dying sits in the middle of the house, for years, for everyone to see.

Executives do nothing of the kind. They are strong, even with a burnout now and then. Dying is not a topic.

And yet they know the sentences. A decision gets made, and somewhere in the back it is checked against the obituary.

It tightens with every pull toward something the obituary has no room for.

Dying is one more variant of the significance craze. Which cemetery will I lie in? Père Lachaise? In Accra, the coffin is built as a Mercedes or an airplane, so nobody at the funeral misses who this was. Elsewhere the ashes are shot into orbit.

Then there are the frugal ones. The discounter who was in the ground before anyone heard he had died. And the anonymous grave: can a CEO ego bear that?

Mozart got one. A shaft grave in Vienna, no stone, nobody knows the spot. Being remembered does not hang on a place of pilgrimage.

Do I think of a life after death? Once there was heaven. The Calvinist merchant knew where he wanted to go, and worked without rest for a sign that he would get there.

And today? Only rotting bones? The founder, crypto in the wallet, no parish, no family vault, has to pick: in Berlin a start-up freezes the body at minus 196 degrees, elsewhere an avatar keeps the mind talking.

Science fiction has been making offers for a while. The one I like best makes no fuss and keeps its dignity. In Dune, the Fremen give the water of their dead back to the tribe. Nobody holds a speech. One after another steps forward, says they were a friend, takes one small thing. Then it is still. How good.

Going under, being forgotten after all that hard work: that is what gets to executives. And it is nothing to leave to the relatives.

Endings they do know. The move from the garage to the city office. From hardly any revenue to the first million. And the end itself, perhaps: a business idea that fails, a burnout.

My Dada says: when death is not denied in a life, when it becomes part of the grand tour into responsibility that executives are on, then Dada is there so that its terror is not denied either. That terror cannot be taken away, however well we believe we can prepare. But Dada can assist in thinking the end, one’s own exit, and not only the eternal carry-on.

So the question matters: what did I bring into the world? Am I tied to something, a tradition, a group? Or do I lurch along alone?

The usual answers are known. A tree planted. A son to show.

Dada has another one.

The choke collar? Loosened a little.