A handsome young baseball coach killed by a line drive in Arkansas. Two young workers fall a thousand feet to their deaths from the tower in Kansas. An elevator worker in Nebraska slips and literally drowns in a mountain of grain. An old woman in Virginia is attacked and eaten by pit bulls. A Brazilian is swallowed whole by an anaconda. Teens dying on amusement rides. . . .
Few of us really want to die, but none of us want to die in pointless ways like the above. There are good ways to go and there are bad ways to go. There is something unworthy, or shameful, or unjust, or unfair, or just not cricket to clock out after being beaned in a baseball game. Or how about the relatives of that man swallowed by the snake? What do they talk about at the funeral? No one wants their obituary to read: Elmer Fudd, 56, died at home yesterday after choking on a chicken bone. These sort of deaths negate an entire lifetime simply because an odd or ridiculous demise sticks; it is the last, lingering thing we remember of the victim. No matter how much was accomplished, no matter how many good deeds done, no matter how many Nobel Prizes won, the grand culmination of years and years of living is: He had his head chopped off by a helicopter blade. That will be the last mortal act of the deceased and the first thing remembered by the living: She tripped and fell into a vat of acid.
The way I definitely don’t want to go? “You’re kidding? . . . A piece of space junk fell and hit Tom square in the skull?” Or “Poor Tom, ha, ha . . . And, to think, he was a vegetarian and killed like he was . . . smashed flat by a meat wagon as he walked across a Wendy’s parking lot!”
No, if we must go down then let us go “in our sleep,” or just via a simple heart attack, or please, just with normal lung or brain cancer. Better still, let a man go down doing something grand, something heroic: Like dying while saving a bus full of nuns as the runaway vehicle is about to careen over a cliff, or while rescuing caged animals at a burning pet store, or in a gunfight after killing all three muggers attempting to rob and kill a woman. Now those are deaths I can live . . . rather, those are deaths I can die with.
My dream death: To just drop stone cold while I am walking by myself along the banks of the Big Muddy. If I miss the river and fail to get flushed away to the Gulf of Mexico, that’s okay too, just as long as my body is never found. I will fertilize the tree I fall near, or provide food for some scavenging animals, will be no fuss or bother to anyone, and will save the county 5K in funeral expenses.
Final Note: Two years or so ago, a guy was killed in Kansas City in a fight over a woman. Where? The Wild West Saloon. Poor devil.
Final Final Note: TV Westerns and movies aside, not everyone in the Old West died in a gunfight, Indian massacre or buffalo stampede; some actually died by drowning, lightning or a kick in the head from a mule. One man back then apparently misjudged the speed of an ox cart in Denver and was run over and killed; another Westerner visiting New York City was struck dead by a horse-drawn trolley barreling down Broadway at maybe 3-5 mph. Apparently, outrunning a stampede or dodging lead in Dodge was one thing; avoiding speeding ox carts and trolleys in the cities was another.
Related Articles |
