London Bridge is down.

To-day, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II died peacefully at Balmoral Castle after a short illness. She was 96.

When I received this news, broken to me by a New York Times headline, I was sitting in my cubicle at work, connected to a WebEx meeting but only half-listening. This was 11:06 a.m., Pacific time.

My first thought was a stupefied Oh my god. I was suspended in a nasty sort of shock, the kind I hadn’t felt since Stephen Sondheim’s death in November 2021. (Maybe also Alex Trebek’s death a year before. Irreplaceable titans of their respective fields. (Also SOPHIE’s death in January 2021, I had this shock too, the skipped breath, perhaps because she was so young and I had recommended her to my best friend the week before.) Other than that I can’t recall which public figures’ deaths gave me such shocks. Those were the big ones. And now Queen Elizabeth II’s death was the biggest in my lifetime.)

There’s a whole rancorous debate in Britain and environs about what the role of the monarchy should be in the 21st century. Should we preserve it, or get rid of it? Are we better or worse off with a royal family? I have no horse in this debate. I’m not even a British subject.

But I’ve always had nothing but admiration for the Queen. Perhaps it’s because of her professionalism and the sincere dignity with which she treated her singular position. Or because of her longevity and the way that through seven decades of British history she’s been a constant, a last extant link to the glorious steadfast British resolve of the Second World War. Or because she’s actually pretty cool as a person.

My second halfway coherent thought was This is going to be one of those things where everybody remembers where she was when she heard the news for the first time. And so I glanced around and took a mental snapshot of my work cubicle, in all its screens and wiring and mundanity. This is where I was when Queen Elizabeth II shuffled off her mortal coil. Remember this.

Mighty coursing rivers of ink will flow over the next days and weeks by the hands of writers and thinkers far more talented than I will ever be, seeking to capture and commemorate her legacy. So instead of paraphrasing what they will doubtless say, I’ll just relate some of my unfiltered thoughts, of varying degrees of dignity and relevance, in arbitrary order.

I wonder how The Crown is handling it. When they first started releasing seasons in 2016, their release schedule had been such that their sixth and final season would probably come out around 2022 or 2023. A tiny part of me hoped that the Queen would live long enough to see The Crown complete, and wondered what she would have thought of it. And she did live to see 2022, but because of coronavirus pandemic delays we have yet to see Season 5 drop.

This must be an awkward time for Queen, the band. Everybody else is making heartfelt statements about what the Queen meant to them on Twitter and such. The surviving members of Queen must be thinking, “Okay, so do we make our own statement? How do we do that without being awkward about the fact that our name is Queen?”

When Stephen Sondheim died, I fell into a Stephen Sondheim haze. Throughout December I read the entirety of his lyrics and listened to all of his cast albums, and this craze lasted until mid-January at least. I wonder how long the British monarchy will occupy an outsized portion of my thoughts.

I am flying to Vancouver in two days. What differences should I expect to see, now that Canada has a King? Will there be new banknotes? Will there be new portraits hanging on the solemn walls of government buildings? Will people sing “God Save the King” yet?

Elizabeth II was twenty-five when her father King George VI died and she acceded to the throne. Twenty-five is my age now. What am I doing with my life?

His Royal Highness Prince Philip died on the same day as rapper DMX, 9 April 2021. In the media headlines they shared top billing, uniting British royal family fans with hardcore rap aficionados in shared grief. (This also probably marked the first day that the Duke of Edinburgh and Earl Simmons were mentioned in the same sentence.) I wonder who, if anyone, could be Queen Elizabeth II’s DMX.

I wonder what the last song the Queen would ever listen to was. I like to imagine it was something stately and dignified, or possibly sentimental, but I can’t dismiss the possibility that it was two minutes of “As It Was” by Harry Styles through a tinny car radio on the Balmoral grounds.

I wonder how much she worried about Operation London Bridge, the impeccably detailed funeral plans which were set in motion upon her death. I know that she had a hand in crafting some of these protocols, which had been formulated since at least the 1960s and steadily updated through the decades. But as frailty overcame her over the past few months, how much would she have worried about them? This morning, did she have a premonition of her own demise, and if so, did such thoughts as Forty-eight hours hence, my coffin will be racing through the English countryside on the Royal Train en route to London occur to her?

King Charles III, who became King immediately upon the Queen’s passing, has already made some kingly decisions, one of which was that he be called King Charles III. The finalisation of his regnal name raises some language questions. I’ve always thought of the whole 17th-century period with the two King Charleses as “the Caroline era”, and so we would be leaving the second Elizabethan era and entering a new Caroline era. But upon further research to-day I learned that the Caroline era only refers to the reign of King Charles I. King Charles II gets “the Carolean era”. Well, fine. Good for them. But if we’re going to follow their example and vary the suffix with each Charles, then what does King Charles III get? What other suffixes suffice? Are we now in the Carolish era? The Carolese?

Against my better judgement I waded into Wikipedia articles about British politicians. Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s resignation set off an election to name his successor, and the new Prime Minister is Liz Truss of the Conservative Party. Two days ago Queen Elizabeth II invited her to form a government in her name. When I looked up the other major Conservative Party candidate, Rishi Sunak, my first thought was He looks like Beto O’Rourke. Then I looked up a picture of Beto O’Rourke and thought, no, not really. Maybe more like Julián Castro? I am still trying to diagnose why Mr. Sunak’s photograph gave me Beto O’Rourke vibes. But so long as we’re on the topic of the likenesses of 2020 US Democratic presidential candidates, Liz Truss looks more like Kirsten Gillibrand than Rishi Sunak looks like either Beto O’Rourke or Julián Castro.

I see it is midnight now, and we have strayed far from the topic of Her Majesty the Queen. And so it goes.