Entering the memorial parlor, Iona saw the turnout was good. All Weston’s colleagues had come, and as the school was closed for the afternoon, many of the students had come too. The people Iona didn’t recognize were, presumably, Weston’s friends and neighbors. Rather than walking down the central aisle, Iona went down one side and made her way to the front, where a space had been reserved for her.

The last few mourners filed in, the doors closed, the room went quiet, and the undertaker took up her position at the front. Weston’s plain coffin stood open on a table behind her.

“Weston,” said the undertaker. “Architect. Teacher.” She then gestured to Iona, which was her cue to rise and take the undertaker’s place.

Iona looked out across the rows of faces, all angled expectantly toward her. She turned to the coffin and peered in at the body of her deceased colleague. Weston’s inanimate form looked as if he might just be resting. The surest sign that he was actually dead was the perfect symmetry with which his body had been laid out. The precision was traditional and unmistakable. Iona reached across and placed her hand on Weston’s. It was cold and smooth to the touch.

Iona turned back to the crowd and spoke. “In all my years of teaching, I have had the pleasure of working alongside many brilliant and inspiring people. But few were as creative in their thinking, or as clear in their communication as Weston. He was utterly dedicated to his students. I remember once finding him asleep in the corner of the staff room. The planning department had returned one of his designs with what they thought was a minor change, but actually meant completely restructuring the ground floor—and the plans needed to be revised and submitted to the king in two days. Instead of getting someone else to cover his seminar on load-bearing experiments, Weston skipped two downtimes so he could do both because he didn’t want to let the students down. I couldn’t rouse him, I had to pull him home myself in a rickshaw.”

Some laughter at that image.

“The school is poorer for his loss. So is the city. His contribution, in terms of design and knowledge, was immense. He will not be easily replaced, but he will be easily remembered.”

She mentioned nothing about how he’d died. People didn’t want to dwell on that.

As Iona returned to her seat, returning appreciative glances with a nod, she wondered whether she had said those words before to someone else’s mourners. She had spoken at a huge number of funerals—she was always asked to, if she’d known the deceased—and what she’d just said had a familiar ring to it. Even the anecdote, which the more she thought about it may well have been about a different colleague. She worried that someone in the audience might remember her saying it and find this disrespectful.

But whether she had said those things before or not, she still meant them. And surely nobody was comparing this eulogy with her previous ones and checking for repetition. Those words she’d just spoken would go in no book, they had lived in the air for a moment and now they died just like the man they’d commemorated. The content of them was less important than the feeling they left behind.