Zadie Smith wrote a perceptive piece in 2013, entitled “Man vs. Corpse,” for the New York Review of Books. It feels eerily appropriate now that everyone has mortality on the brain. Here’s a snippet:
Imagining that reality—in which everybody (except me) becomes a corpse—presents no difficulties whatsoever. Like most people in New York City, I daily expect to find myself walking the West Side Highway with nothing but a shopping cart stacked with bottled water, a flashlight, and a dead loved one on my back, seeking a suitable site for burial. The postapocalyptic scenario—the future in which everyone’s a corpse (except you)—must be, at this point, one of the most thoroughly imagined fictions of the age.