No one knows exactly when 'Sending Off (The Ordinary Version)' first appeared. It exists in no official catalog. It has no registered composer. The earliest confirmed recording dates to approximately 2191, but oral accounts from Shelf elders place variants of the melody as far back as 2175, passed between communities in the lower wards as a sung farewell for the dead. The title's parenthetical — 'The Ordinary Version' — is understood to be an act of defiance: a statement that the deaths of ordinary people deserve a ceremony as real and permanent as any Spire memorial. The song is structured as a slow, cyclical melody built on a Middle Eastern maqam scale interwoven with West African communal call-and-response, and it is almost always performed live, a cappella, by whoever is present. There is no canonical recording. Every performance is the real version.

The lyrics — which vary by community but share a stable core — speak directly to the dead person, telling them specific small things: the name of their street, the color of their door, what the light looked like from their window. The practice of inserting personal details into the stable melodic structure means every performance is simultaneously the same song and entirely unique. It is sung at Shelf funerals, at memorials for workers killed in industrial accidents, at vigils for those who disappeared into corporate detention. It has been sung, quietly and illegally, inside at least two Vantablack Media holding facilities.