We say, “The end. Full stop.”  It suggests finality, definition, mastery and control.

Full stops allow us to move neatly from one thing to the next, to package ideas in sentences and segment, select and ignore; they also shrink thought into soundbites, tweets and slogans that are quick, cheap and often disposable.

No other punctuation mark expresses death so directly, or stereotypically: as a blunt ending beyond which nothing can be added, with a bleak clarity and a silence.  It characterizes fear and taboo of death, and in modern times we incinerate corpses rather than go on pilgrimages for souls.

Modern medicine is characteristically ‘full stop’: life expectancy has risen but dying has become more prolonged.  There is a perversity of demographics: we obsess about youth while some societies diminish as population pyramids invert.

Politicians might promise neat full stops in their manifestos, and autocrats see themselves as the definitive solution.  But democracy is paradoxical: resilient and delicate, disorderly and disciplined, requiring pauses, changes and nuances that go through all kinds of punctuation – and, in the longer term, one semi-colon after another.

We might even reflect on the difference between the ‘full stop’ (in place of the ‘short stop’ comma) and ‘period’; the French ‘point’ and Spanish ‘punto final’.

What else does a ‘full stop’ suggest to you?

“Never place a period where God has placed a comma” wrote Gracie Allen in her last letter to her husband George Burns.

Commas pause but they are not an ending: they allow continuity, breath, dialogue – and attention to relationship.  Like stitches in a larger tapestry.

Religion encourages us to see death as more than a full stop; at the least, it adds a comma.  It offers flow where the full stop seems absolute.  Near-death, psychedelic and some altered forms of consciousness also can make death seem less like an abrupt end and more like a threshold, a pause or an opening.

Conversation is comma-shaped: through hesitations, interruptions and returns – more like a stream than a sequence of hard endings.

Kahlil Gibran writes in his book ‘The Prophet’,

“If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.

For life and death are one, even as the river and sea are one.”

Is death best considered as a comma or as a full stop?

“Ellipsis thinking” embraces continuation, drift, mystery and the unknowable.

On one hand, it suggests partial knowledge, absence, forgetting and loss of grip.  On the other hand, unlike the more defined pauses of commas or full stops, it can represent the wisdom of accepting incompleteness and doubt.

We might view the darker side of death and particularly dying through such thinking, without sugarcoating: hard, prolonged and at times unbearable.  This can be the case for those directly involved as well as those around them, and acute when dealing with long chronic illness or dementia.

In a more gentle way, we might view the last phase of a non-violent and predictable end of life  – making up about 90% of all deaths in normal circumstances – as a progressing process of stilling.

Time itself works in ellipses, as the past fades, fragments or is remade.  Ghosts and dead narrators also cross the boundary between life and death, or simply being ‘in’ or ‘out’: signaling alternate realities, metaphorical residue, or social marginality.

Ellipses stretch understanding across time, space and unfinished experience.  Where does that exist for you most acutely?

Exclamation marks and colons do not trail away like ellipses: they jolt, propel and force transition.

In relation to death, the exclamation mark signals rupture: the sudden, violent, shocking or traumatic.  “Exclamatory death” can also expose extreme inequality and injustice.  The violence of war, slavery and colonialism traverses generations.

We fanaticize about the forceful changes suggested by such punctuation, above all when we catastrophize and, in an ultimate form, worry about “the end of the world”.

In positive terms, such punctuation also suggests joy, revelation or salvation – perhaps signifying new love or life.

In all cases there may be theatre or spectacle, but above all consequence.  Exclamation marks may be a blast, but once the dust has settled the colon tends to show what is visible in daylight: explanation, reckoning, reconstruction or ruin.

We all have experienced, and may fear and desire, forceful and often unexpected change suggested by this punctuation.

Parentheses add supplementary or explanatory information: an aside, an afterthought, a clarification, something not essential to the main sentence.

A footnote implies there is more than meets the eye: something below the line that still matters.

They both however have their place and cannot be dismissed.

Both parentheses and footnotes may be skipped, rushed through or ignored altogether, perhaps because we don’t have the time or the capacity.  They may relate to people and things in the margins, the things that escape our attention – perhaps the uninteresting, unmarked, unmentionable.

Grief – anticipatory as well as retrospective – belongs to, and is so much more than, parentheses and footnotes: what we tend to try to sideline but keeps returning to the main narrative.  Grief is singular and incomparable, exceeding language, and stays with us all our lives.  We mourn people and things that have vanished, but also things we may never see: birdsong, butterflies, winter ice, familiar seasons.  Grief is born of love: a strenuous voyage that is also a gift that unmasks and transforms us.  Love lingers in us like an ellipsis; it both limits us and lifts us up.

We continue in life: through relationships, grief, memory and change; never-ending text divided and linked by a semicolon from one phrase to another, and another.

The semicolon is my favourite metaphorical punctuation mark.

It expresses balance, nuance, difference-in-relation and transition.  It combines pause with continuation, and can be seen to link in two directions at once: past and future, ancestors and descendants, the living and the dead, memory and legacy, tradition and change.

Project Semicolon already uses it to support people living with mental health struggles and suicidal thoughts.

“Semicolon thinking” encourages death literacy, neither denying death nor collapsing into it – a wrestle, a dance, a struggle … choreography.

And it speaks so much to life: revealing its meaning gradually, phrase after phrase, as we grow and change.

We seek answers, but ultimately questions can be more important.  They help us look further and differently, learn and change.  My interest in punctuation as a metaphor began when I read the assertion that “Death is a comma, not a full stop’: I am continuing to explore that, trying to develop better questions, and more refined punctuation.

Punctuation is often described as the music of language.  Like a conductor shaping a symphony, it silently guides the rhythm, pace and emphasis of the written word and therefore how we read and understand and feel it.  This shapes our thoughts – and our life.

Punctuation therefore offers a lexicon for loss and meaning.  Writing, and answers, can be a way of rehearsing endings: shaping them, preserving something, letting go.  But texts are never final.  They are interpreted, revised and reread.   Meaning rarely settles into a full stop.  It continues, more like a comma or ellipsis.  It invites the next question, the next day and the next.

At the same time as writing The Punctuation of Loss I also explored loss and transition in organizations – and how, like death, we tend to deny this: we expect continual growth rather than query how it might be better to also plan for loss, transition and decline.

The MIILL framework – Making Individuals & Institutions Loss Literate – emerged from this body of work.  It offers a guide, free and without fuss, to ask questions about a wide range of transitions: to recognize, reflect and reimagine and then consider what could be renewed, and what could end.

I hope it might help you formulate some good questions.