deathoftheauthors

I think of the writers who made me want to write. Many of them seem to have died in ways that resemble their works and preoccupations.

Samuel Beckett wrote often of people who found their selves whittled away. Going blind, unable to move, to speak, losing sensation and coherence. Beckett died in 1989, suffering emphysema and probably Parkinson's, slipping into a coma from which he never woke.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote "I am dynamite", wrote of bombast and thunder and living large and boldly and authentically at the edge of reason. His mind broke and he spent his last years wholly mad, lost in his own depths, in the care of his deeply evil sister.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote of the sad, absurd coincidence and blunt happenstances of life and death. (So it goes.) He fell down the stairs.

David Foster Wallace's writing on deep, inescapable depression spoke to me a lot as a younger, struggling man. He took his own life in his garage, suddenly and unexpectedly.

There's something uncanny to it all. How art imitates life until life imitates art, then death imitates some tangled up mess of the two. Perhaps some of these are just ghoulish coincidence. Perhaps some are evidence of a life authentically lived. Either way, remind me to write plenty of stories about people who die in their sleep old and loved, full of whiskey and good food.

Then again, Keats' paean to immortality in Bright Star didn't do him much good. He died at 25.