James McCarthy in Death Anxiety (1980) writes about the child’s first experience of death when viewing a corpse as the understanding “that death is a state of permanent immobility with shut, sightless eyes, a state of profound sleep or both” (McCarthy 1980:17). In the work Pretend to Sleep I asked my grandmother to lie down on the bed and pretend to sleep. I watched her while she lay still and ‘asleep’.