Death and the Implication of Grammar

"He is one of the best.......Oh, he was one of the best lawyers in town. I can't believe I just referred to him in the past tense."

The students were working on a text with questions quietly. I thumbed my way through a grammar book looking for a lesson to photocopy to bring into my teaching methods course on Sunday. The English adviser, Tzippy, walked in the room to advise me she would be leaving early today because she had a funeral to attend. Her friend had a heart attack at 6 a.m. His wife/widow is a nurse, and couldn't do anything to save him.


When Tzippy said that sentence, it collided with the grammar I was thumbing through. When we die, our grammatical sense of being changes. It necessitates a new grammatical structure.

I suppose I never thought about the way death can change your grammatical being.