Skip to main content

O Death

 


The first famous death I remember was President Kennedy. The president’s death was shocking and it is etched in my brain forever, but before he died, I hardly knew President Kennedy. I knew the name, and knew he was the leader of our country, but when you are four years-old, you hardly pay attention to such people. You certainly don’t know anything about policy or politics. I may have heard him speak on the news a few times. So, it was shocking, but I didn’t really know him.

The first death that really touched me was the death of Walt Disney. Walt Disney I knew. I saw him every Sunday night on TV as he introduced the Wonderful World of Color, which after his death would be changed to The Wonderful World of Disney. I had been to Disneyland, the most fun place on Earth and it had his name on it! As young as I was, I had seen many of his movies. For such a person to die, to be no more, was a blow to my eight-year-old self. I couldn’t believe it. I thought it must be wrong. Surely, somebody got it wrong.

Later, I had the same feeling when I learned that Judy Garland had died. I only knew her from the Wizard of Oz, but that was enough, being one of my favorite movies at the time. My mother had to tell me that Judy was not a little girl anymore. It was more shocking to learn that she had died of a drug overdose. My mother told me that she had not had the happiest of life. I couldn’t understand it.

The older you get, the more acquainted you become with death. After a while, it is not just people on the news that die, but people you actually know: classmates, friends, family. I started asking questions about death from a very early age. My mom tried her best to answer my questions but she didn’t have all the answers and she didn’t lie to me to make me think she did. I became a philosopher at a very young age. Death is, after all, that undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns. Yes, Shakespeare loved to talk about death. It is one of his recurring themes.

It is strange that in literature, Death has often been personified. He is (usually it is a “he”) sometimes creepy, sometimes mean, but sometimes just an ordinary Joe. Sometimes he is a stand-in for the Devil -- someone to wager against, to gain a few more years. And sometimes he is downright funny (see terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. I mean, that Death is a hoot!) We have a complicated relationship with death. Perhaps it is our coping mechanism. It is the one thing we all have in common.

Now excuse me. I am going to go read some Terry Pratchett.

Star Liner

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu

My first experience with cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction was Neuromancer by William Gibson. Neuromancer was one of the early works that defined the cyberpunk genre. It was insanely influential. It won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award. But for me, it just did not resonate. I had a hard time visualizing the concepts. It left a bad taste in my mouth for cyberpunk. I mostly avoided the genre. Then a couple of years ago I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson which is cyberpunk (although some people say it is a parody of cyberpunk). Whatever, I liked it. I recently picked up All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu and it immediately became apparent to me that this was cyberpunk. Julia Z is the main character, and I think this is going to be the start of a series following her. She is a hacker (hence cyberpunk). She has got herself in trouble and so she lives on the margins, barely making it. Then a lawyer asks her for her help. His wife has been kidnapped. The ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Linear Nature of Time

    Go Go back Go back to the time before Before you did it Before they did it Before it was done to you Before the toast fell on the floor Before the catastrophe Before the mistake Before time’s scars Before   Go Go back Redeem it Rework it Fix it Go back   No you cannot Go back Star Liner
Post a Comment
Read more

The Screaming Silence

  As I have mentioned, I worked for two seasons on the Spotted Owl Survey for the US Forest Service back in the day. This involved setting up stations around areas that were scheduled for timber harvesting to see if there were owls nesting there. We would look at a topographic map and see where we needed to put stations (usually along logging roads) so that we could get complete coverage of the area to be harvested. We would go out during the day and mark these stations with ribbons, then at night we would go to each station and “hoot” for ten minutes. If we did not get a response, we would move on to the next station and so on until we could be sure there were no spotted owls in the vicinity. This meant we were working at night in the woods. There is a lot of wildlife activity at night in the woods. It is not just owls, a fair number of wildlife are nocturnal. We saw coyotes, bobcats, cougars, bats, frogs, deer, elk, among other things. But it was not just seeing the wildlife, ...
Post a Comment
Read more