Wise Up!
Death
By David Bruce
April 14, 2008
• British fantasy author Terry Pratchett started out as a journalist, but realized quickly that he wanted to move on from that occupation, although it is good training for writers. He says, “I was sick of asking: ‘How did you feel, Mrs. Smith, when your son was knifed to death by muggers?’” He points out, “What is she going to say? ‘Oh, I never liked him much?’” One day when he was a trainee reporter he wrote an article about a collision between a car and a minibus. Six children had been killed, and he was thinking, “This is a great story. It’s going on page one.” However, another trainee reporter came to work late because he had been consoling his mother after their sister had not returned home. Mr. Pratchett looked at his notebook, and he saw the name of the sister — she was one of the six children who had died in the collision. He says, “I ringed the name and handed my notebook to the news editor and went to the toilet. I went into a cubicle and locked the door. And then I laughed — I laughed, but I wanted to scream. There was a lot of that sort of thing, and ultimately I didn’t want to do it.”
• When improvisational comedian Del Close died, he left this provision in his will: “I give my skull to the Goodman Theatre, for a production of “Hamlet” in which to play Yorick, or for any other purposes the Goodman Theatre deems appropriate.” However, when he died, Charna Halpern, his partner at ImprovOlympic, was unable to get his head, and therefore Ms. Halpern had his entire remains cremated. She ended up buying a skull from the Anatomical Chart Company in Skokie, Ill. To make the skull as much like Mr. Close’s as possible, she pulled out several of its teeth before presenting it to Robert Falls, the artistic director of the Goodman Theatre. Mr. Falls keeps the skull on one of his bookshelves, and no one is bothered by the truth of whose corpse it originally belonged to. According to Kim “Howard” Johnson, author of a biography of Mr. Close titled “The Funniest One in the Room: The Lives and Legends of Del Close” (Chicago Review Press), “The attitude of most of Del’s friends is that if it wasn’t originally Del’s skull, it is now.”
• Being an investigative photographer can lead to mental anguish that is severe enough to make the photographer commit suicide. Kevin Carter was one of the members of the Bang Bang Club of South African photojournalists, and he and the other members did much as to expose apartheid and its brutality. And in Sudan, he took a photograph of a girl who looked as if she were about to starve to death. The photograph won a Pulitzer Prize, but Mr. Carter felt guilty because he had not helped the girl. People kept asking him what had happened to the girl, and he did not know what had happened to the girl. Eventually, he committed suicide. Of course, as an investigative journalist, he had seen many bad things. His suicide note said in part, “I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain, of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners…”
• After the philosopher Socrates was found guilty by an Athenian court of doing such things as corrupting the youth of Athens, he was condemned to be executed by drinking poisonous hemlock. He did so, dying at age 70. Later, after Alexander the Great, the Macedonian conqueror of Athens, died, the Athenians rebelled against anyone who had been associated with Alexander. The philosopher Aristotle, a Macedonian and the author of such works as the “Poetics” and the “Nicomachean Ethics,” had been Aristotle’s tutor when Alexander was young. Aristotle chose to go into exile, rather than staying in Athens, so he could prevent the Athenians from “sinning twice against philosophy.”
• When Rabbi Zusya was on his death bed, he was afraid even though he knew that God is loving and merciful. He told his students, “When I stand before the Throne of Judgment, I am not worried that God will ask me, ‘Why were you not a Moses?’ After all, I am not Moses. I am not worried that God will ask me, ‘Why were you not an Isaiah?’ After all, I am not Isaiah. However, I am worried that God will ask me, ‘Zusya, why were you not Zusya? Why didn’t you live up to the best that Zusya could have been?’”
• Obviously, writers consider writing important; otherwise, they would not do the hard work of writing. Julian Barnes, in his meditation on death titled “Nothing to Be Frightened Of,” tells a joke about a writer (himself) being told by his doctor that he is dying. The author asks how long he has left to live, and the doctor, understanding the question that lies behind the question that was specifically asked, replies, “I’d say about 200 pages — 250 pages if you are lucky or work fast.”
• Charles Dickens described Little Nell, a character that appeared in his novel “The Little Curiosity Shop,” as “a creature fresh from the hand of God.” Many, many people, including mature men, loved the character and were saddened when she, fictional though she was, died. Irish statesman Daniel O’Connell read the scene of Little Nell’s death while he was in a moving train, cried, “He could not have killed her!” — and threw the book out of a window.
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