Yes. I worked for a small studio that was a part of a big agency. We had two directors - one that sat on the board of the main agency, which was in transition

Yes. I worked for a small studio that was a part of a big agency. We had two directors - one that sat on the board of the main agency, which was in transition to tech, and a designer that had been relocated. The designer was allegedly a director in name only, due to years of service, but he tried to run everything. Many of the in-house clients went through him, and he led the design work on everything that went through the building. One Sunday, when I was out with some mates, I got a call from the MD. The designer hadn't turned up on Friday, and we assumed he was ill or that he was busy doing something else. He had died in a car crash on his way into work. The MD was on holiday, and because he was far away he couldn't get a flight back until later on in the week. That Monday morning was horrific. Most of our PM's were in tears, while I went upstairs with the design team to have a beer. We waited until lunch for one of the London directors to come down, and a few of them spent the week down with us ensuring that everyone could get back to work. To their credit, we were largely functional again within a few days. Many clients were sympathetic that we had suffered a loss, but I remember being brought into a conference call where one of our PM's was trying to talk to a client. The designer managed a load of smaller clients himself, and one of them had some work that needed deploying that day. The PM asked for a few days to get it ready, and as I walked into the room I heard the client say "I don't give a fuck who died. I want my website live today". We didn't have any of the code, so I had to hack together a FOH website from the HTML we had in a few hours, all while a dozen people were crying downstairs. We weren't super close, but we had some good chats, and he came across as a good, family man. We bonded over combat sports, because I train BJJ/MMA, and his nephew is an amateur boxer. I don't get too emotional, but I struggled when we all went to his funeral, and I got to meet his family. The main thing I'll take from that experience was watching his kids play in the pub garden, having a fun time with their friends, despite this being the wake for their father. In terms of bouncing back, the office is no longer operating, but for the months after there was a stronger bond between many of us. Many of us still meet up from time to time, and each year some of us meet up to remember him.