Go Fourth and Meet Your Maker

John Adams died on this day in 1826, at the age of 91.

Adams was our first Vice-President. He and Thomas Jefferson were correspondents for a quarter-century. Adams resolved to live until the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence -- July 4, 1826. That morning he was awakened by his servant, who inquired if he knew what day it was.

"Oh, yes," Adams replied, "it is the glorious fourth of July. God bless it. God bless you all."

He then lapsed into unconsciousness. Later that afternoon, he awakened briefly. "Thomas Jefferson still survives," he said before dying.

Jefferson had died earlier that day. His last words:

“Is it the Fourth? I resign my spirit to God, my daughter, and my country.” 

(Trivia: Another U. S. President died on July 4th -- James Monroe, July 4, 1831. Also, Pres. Calvin Coolidge was born on July 4, 1872.)

The great American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804. He wrote:

"We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death."

Speaking of presidents: from the sublime to the ridiculous

Bitter Bierce

Ambrose Bierce, a unique and mysterious American writer, an agnostic and the patron saint of cynics, was born on this day in 1842.

Bierce was a journalist and short-story writer, primarily. He is best-known for “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which Kurt Vonnegut called the greatest American short story, and for “The Devil’s Dictionary.” 

Two of Bierce’s three sons died before he did, one by suicide and the other by pneumonia brought on by his alcoholism. The event that might have wounded Bierce the deepest, however, was the Battle of Shiloh (April 1862), in which he fought for the Union side as a first lieutenant. The horror of war was a preoccupation of his in his later writings.

In his “Devil’s Dictionary, Bierce wrote: “Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.”

And what about religion, that could bring men together?

Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable…Religions are conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises.”

We’re assuming you include Christianity?

“Christian, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin…Camels and Christians receive their burdens kneeling.”

There’s nothing to the Bible, then?

“Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.”

You don’t think there can be genuinely religious people?

“Clergyman, n. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.”

Or genuine faith?

“Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.”

Prayer is useless, then, in your view?

“Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.”

Well, then, how about theology?

“Theology is a thing of unreason altogether, an edifice of assumption and dreams, a superstructure without a substructure.”

Don’t people have to have something to look up to?

“Piety, n. Reverence for the Supreme Being, based upon His supposed resemblance to man.  “Reverence, n. The spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man.”  “Impiety, n. Your irreverence toward my deity.”

We will assume you’re a non-believer? How does it feel to be called a heathen?

“Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see and feel.”

No one knows how, or where, Bierce died. It was apparently his wish to slip away unnoticed. The man whose motto was “Nothing matters” is still remembered, a fact that would have amused him.  In “The Devil’s Dictionary,” Bierce wrote:

“Immortality: A toy which people cry for/And on their knees apply for/Dispute, contend and lie for/ And if allowed/Would be right proud/Eternally to die for.”

And away he went

The one-and-only Jackie Gleason died on this day in 1987. Gleason was born in 1916. When he was three years old, his dad walked out, saying he was going down the street for a pack of smokes, and never came back. The young Gleason naturally turned to…comedy.

He grew up in Brooklyn, the setting for “The Honeymooners,” in which Gleason played the most famous bus driver ever, Ralph Kramden. (A statue of Gleason as Kramden stands outside the Port Authority bus terminal in New York.) Only 39 major episodes were made, and Gleason eschewed rehearsals, maybe because they cut into his drinking time. He was a fixture at Toots Shor’s restaurant and lounge; when his pal Toots Shor died in 1977, Gleason sent roses and a note: “Save a table for 2.”

He could do drama as well as comedy; he gained the sobriquet, “The Great One,” supposedly hung on him by Orson Welles. A whole new generation was introduced to Gleason as Sheriff Buford T. Justice in “Smokey and the Bandit.”

Gleason was a smoker as well as a drinker, with a five-packs-a-day habit. He died at home, of colon and liver cancer. He donated his huge collection of books, many on the subject of life after death and the occult, to the University of Miami.

In an episode of “The Honeymooners” called “A Matter of Life and Death,” Ralph is convinced he’s dying, having mixed up his medical report with that of his mother-in-law’s dog. “Yeah, Norton,” he tells his pal Ed Norton (the great Art Carney), “my life’s been no bed of roses. Forty years ago I came into this world with a pair of strong lungs, pink cheeks, and a lot of big ideas. And what’ll I have to show for it when I’m leavin’? A blue tongue, a bald head, and a saucer of milk with a pill in it.” (Norton wipes a tear and blows his nose.)

Ralph decides to sell his “story” to a magazine so that his widow, Alice, will have money to live on. When he discovers his mistake, he has his pal Ed Norton pose as a doctor to help him get out of his deal with the magazine.  (“Don’t touch me – I’m sterile,” Norton warns.) The publisher realizes Dr. Norton is a fake, and that his part of the story is a hoax. He blows up.

“Amma, amma, amma,” Kramden stutters, his signature response when he gets nervous. But then the publisher fingers Norton only, still believing Ralph has a fatal illness. He threatens Norton with lifetime in jail for taking advantage of poor Ralph. Norton goes to pieces, and Ralph steps in and confesses. They get out with only a tap on the wrist.

Jackie Gleason’s epitaph: “And a-way we go!”

Cioran on death

He was Eraserhead's dad, too

E. M. Cioran, a Romanian writer who wrote in French, died on this day in 1995. A sampling of Cioran on death and dying:

"What is neither healthy or natural is the frantic appetite to exist."

"To rid oneself of life is to deprive oneself of the pleasures of deriding it."

"I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the gods have been against me."

"Life and death have little enough content...We always know this too late, when it can no longer help us either to live or to die."

"So many memories that loom up without any apparent necessity -- of what use are they except to show us that with age we are becoming external to our own life, that these remote "events" no longer have anything to do with us, and that someday the same will be true of this life itself?"

Cioran's mother's last note to him ended: "Whatever people try to do, they'll regret it sooner or later."

I'm taking someone with me

Blaise Pascal, French mathematician, essayist and philosopher, was born on this day in 1623. He wrote:

"We shall die alone."

Pascal himself died at age 39. In his Pensees, he had written:

"For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed."

Erewhonville, man

English novelist Samuel Butler was born on this day in 1835.

In Butler’s most well-known work, the utopian (or dystopian – it’s not always clear) novel, Erewhon, published anonymously in 1872, a traveler named Higgs claims to have visited an undiscovered country, named Erewhon. (Nowhere spelled backwards, or almost.) The book is Butler’s critique of Victorian England.

Narrator Higgs explains the Erewhonians' attitude toward death.

"The Erewhonians regard death with less abhorrence than disease. They insist that the greater number of those who are commonly said to die, have never yet been born--not, at least, into that unseen world which is alone worthy of consideration.”  Can we get a shout-out to Plato? Or maybe Jesus visited Erewhon before Higgs did, during those “missing years.”

In Erewhon, death is no big deal. "The mere knowledge that we shall one day die does not make us very unhappy; no one thinks that he or she will escape, so that none are disappointed.  And why would they be disappointed, since they’ll be headed to that invisible world that is worthy of consideration?

The denizens of Erewhon, Higgs says, "do not put up monuments, or write epitaphs, but they have a custom which comes to much the same thing, for the instinct of preserving the name alive after the death of the body seems to be common to all mankind. They have statues of themselves made while they are still alive (those, that is, who can afford it), and write inscriptions under them, which are often quite as untruthful as are our own epitaphs…”  And why not? Why leave it to someone else to sing our praises? Who among us non-Erewhonians, listening in on our funerals, would be wholly satisfied with the eulogies? Nothing to be done at that point.

"If a person is ugly,” Higgs goes on, “he does not sit as a model for his own statue, although it bears his name. He gets the handsomest of his friends to sit for him, and one of the ways of paying a compliment to another is to ask him to sit for such a statue. Women generally sit for their own statues, from a natural disinclination to admit the superior beauty of a friend, but they expect to be idealised.” The first law of Nature is self-preservation, so be sure and put your best self forward.

Higgs describes the admirable post-death ritual practiced in Erewhon:

"When any one dies, the friends of the family write no letters of condolence, neither do they attend the scattering, nor wear mourning, but they send little boxes filled with artificial tears, and with the name of the sender painted neatly upon the outside of the lid. The tears vary in number from two to fifteen or sixteen, according to degree of intimacy or relationship; and people sometimes find it a nice point of etiquette to know the exact number they ought to send.” (So if sextuplets died, one could theoretically send 96 tears.)

"Strange as it may appear, this attention is highly valued, and its omission by those from whom it might be expected is keenly felt. These tears were formerly stuck with adhesive plaster to the cheeks of the bereaved, and were worn in public for a few months after the death of a relative; they were then banished to the hat or bonnet, and are now no longer worn."

Butler himself died at age 66, in a nursing home in London. His body was cremated (his wish) and the ashes either dispersed or buried in an unmarked grave. There would have been precious few ever to send, or shed, a tear in his memory, had a manuscript of his other famous work, The Way of All Flesh, not been found in a drawer in 1903, leading to a revival and a subsequent intensity of interest in Butler’s works -- a return from the dead.

Death, his bosom friend

Joseph Addison, English politician and co-author with Richard Steele of two famous periodicals, The Tatler and The Spectator, died on this day in 1719. His highly apocryphal last words were:

"See in what peace a Christian can die."

These were supposedly uttered as a challenge to his stepson, Lord Warwick. However, as there is no evidence that Warwick led anything but a blameless existence, the tale is probably a romance.

Addison did, indubitably, say or write the following:

"I have somewhere met with the epitaph on a charitable man which has pleased me very much. I cannot recollect the words, but here is the sense of it: ‘What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me.'"

"The fear of death often proves mortal, and sets people on methods to save their lives, which infallibly destroy them."

"How beautiful is death, when earn'd by virtue!"

"We are always doing something for posterity, but I would fain see posterity do something for us."

And this, not apropos of death but just some words to remember:

"There is no defense against criticism except obscurity."

To my bed of dirt

As for him, he swallowed kryptonite

George ("Superman") Reeves committed suicide on this day in 1959. He was being visited by friends, when he announced:

"I'm tired. I'm going back to bed."

He went to his bedroom and shot himself in the head.

For a year's worth of super-entertaining last words:

Roses blowin' in the wind?

June is National Rose Month.  This poem by Robert Burns, written in 1794, was cited by Bob Dylan as the biggest influence on his songwriting style.

“O, my Luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June.
O, my Luve's like a melodie
That's sweetly play'd in tune.

As fair as thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will love thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun:
I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run:

And fare thee well, my only luve!
And fare thee weel, a while!
And I will come again, my luve,
Tho' it ware ten thousand mile.”

They say journalism is dead, but was it ever alive?

Prolific British author and Christian champion G. K. Chesterton died on this day in 1936.  He was the author of the splendid Father Brown detective tales.  He wrote:

“Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”

Today’s deathless verse:

A patron at Kentucky Fried

  Is calmly eating chicken;

A newsman sits down by his side –

  The plot begins to thicken.

With pen in hand, the scribbler dreams

  Of deeds most dire and foul;

The headline on his story screams:

  “Man eating chicken on prowl!”

Apparently he wished to be cremated

Fantasy/adventure writer Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian) committed suicide on this day in 1936. He left a note:

All fled--all done, so lift me on the pyre;
The feast is over, and the lamps expire,

which may or may not have been lifted from another source.

A great movie about Howard's life is The Whole Wide World, starring Vincent D'Onofrio.

He didn't feel so great

Nurse, leeches, please

Alexander the Great died on this day (or on June 11, or perhaps on June 14) in 323 B.C.  He had said a short time before:

"I am dying, with the help of many doctors."

His epitaph:  “"A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough." 

A hero of my life

Charles Dickens, the world's greatest novelist (in my highly subjective opinion), died on this day in 1870. He was 58.

Dickens captured my imagination and my compulsive attention when I was a kid of 12 or so. One summer I lay on the couch day after day, reading his books one after the other.

"There is perhaps no person living who can remember reading David Copperfield for the first time," wrote Virginia Woolf, but I can, vividly. It was the work of Dickens' that I first essayed, and I was a goner after the opening pages, when David talks about the father he never knew, buried in the churchyard close by their house, and "the indefinable compassion I used to feel for (him) lying out alone there in the dark night."

(My own father had died a couple of years before.)

I re-read Dickens through high school, and in college I had a Dickens seminar, during which our professor would expound, noteless, for three hours at a stretch, twice weekly, about the man and his work. It was a thrilling experience -- here was someone even more in love with Dickens than I was. He particularly loved Copperfield , probably because Dickens himself loved the novel above all his others. ("I have my favourite child, and his name is David Copperfield," Dickens wrote.)

What Woolf meant was that reading this particular novel of Dickens is one of those timeless experiences:

"Like Robinson Crusoe and Grimm's Fairy Tales...Pickwick and David Copperfield are not books, but stories communicated by word of mouth in those tender years when fact and fiction merge, and thus belong to those myths and memories of life...

"We remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens...What we remember is the ardour, the excitement, the humour; the oddity of people's characters; the smell and soot and savor of London; the incredible coincidences which hook the most remote lives together; the city, the law courts; this man's limp, that man's nose; some scene under and archway or on the high road; and above all some gigantic and dominating figure...stuffed and swollen with life."

Contrary to his wish to be buried in Rochester Cathedral, Dickens was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. The inscription on his tomb reads:

"He was a sympathiser to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world."

"Dickens did not merely believe in the brotherhood of man in the weak modern way," wrote G. K. Chesterton; "he was the brotherhood of man, and knew it was a brotherhood in sin as well as in aspiration."

And excuse me, Mr. Coolidge

Writer and wit Dorothy Parker died on this day in 1967. An epitaph she had proposed for herself:

"Pardon my dust."


Parker was cremated, and her ashes remained unclaimed for more than 20 years. In her will, Parker bequeathed her estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Foundation. In 1988 the NAACP claimed her remains and placed them in a memorial garden outside their Baltimore headquarters.

A famous Parker mot: After being told that former President Calvin Coolidge had died, she said:

"How could they tell?"

Sorry I can't go with you

German writer Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain) was born on this day in 1875. He wrote:

"What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so."

Today’s Deathless Verse:

When Lazarus was brought back to life,

  He confronted his horrified wife.

She stammered, “I’ve thought of you often;

  I still haven’t paid for your coffin.

Are you planning on staying for good?

  I suppose we could salvage the wood—

It’s used, so it can’t be returned.”

  And Lazarus, being thus spurned,

Crept away and crawled back in his box.

  “I won’t answer,” said he, “further knocks.”

It may be phenomenal, but can I skip it?

American novelist Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage) died on this day in 1900, of tuberculosis. He was 29.  He wrote:

“Perhaps an individual must consider his own death to be the final phenomenon of nature.”

What if you didn’t have to take your death lying down?

A story in the New York Times some time ago reported on the Charbonnet-Labat Funeral Home in New Orleans, which has held two services with the main attraction, the deceased, posed as if still living. At a service for Miriam Burbank, 53, the honoree knocked ‘em dead while seated at a table with a can of beer and a smoke, “just as she had spent a good number of her living days,” as the article put it.

Such viewings have taken place in Puerto Rico since 2008. The first involved a 24-year-old murder victim, Angel Luis Pantojas, whose body was tethered to a wall in his family’s living room. The event was dubbed muerto parao – “dead man standing.” Subsequent ones featured a former boxer standing in a ring, an old woman in a rocking chair, a paramedic at the wheel of an ambulance, and a man dressed like Che Guevara, cigar in hand, seated Indian-style. All of them were arranged by the same funeral home in San Juan.

Said Elsie Rodríguez, the establishment’s vice president: “The family (gets to) see their loved one in a way that would have made them happy — they see them in a way in which they still look alive.”

In “My Struggle,” Karl Knausgaard’s monumental, multi-volume account of his life, the author describes the experience of seeing his dad laid out on a table prior to his funeral, in 1998. “The idea that I could scrutinize this face unhindered for the first time was almost unbearable. It felt like an act of violation…The woodenness forbade any feelings of intimacy. I was no longer looking at a person but something that resembled a person.”

I well recall my selfsame emotions upon seeing, some fifteen years ago, a friend in his coffin, his face like a mask made of wax. He was no longer the always grinning, always jabbering life force he’d been, but was now like something carved out of wood, deeply unsettling to look at. 

The Times story reported that the funeral home in San Juan has had to refuse a few requests it found distasteful, and that it would not grant those that were too far out of the box, so to speak. Ms. Rodriguez said they would not consider holding a wake with someone in a swimsuit, for example.

Why not? My bet is that a good many people anywhere would die for the opportunity to make a good last impression – and after all, it’s their funeral. Anyway, who says that funeral homes have to be so…well, funereal? Would a Leave ‘em Laughing wing detract from the solemn dignity of your average funeral parlor? No doubt about it – but then again, people might actually enjoy going there. And when’s the last time you heard anyone say about a funeral: A good time was had by all.

Lighting our way to dusty death

Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (de Seingalt) died on this day in 1798. He gave his name to a type of adventurous and romantic lover. His last words:

"I have lived as a philosopher and die as a Christian."

Also on this day, in 1910, the author O'Henry (William Sidney Porter) died. His last words?

"Turn up the lights, I don’t want to go home in the dark."

He killed people with his paradoxes

Author Franz Kafka died on this day in 1924. On his deathbed (he died of tuberculosis) he begged his doctor to administer a dose of morphine to end his suffering:

"Kill me, or else you are a murderer!"

In the long short-story, “The Metamorphosis,” published in 1915, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning from “uneasy dreams” to find himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect, apparently a dung beetle. It may be a joke (Gregor is a traveling salesman), but this is no dream, he realizes. (But then, what dreamer is aware that he is dreaming?)

If it’s real, then Gregor is doomed; but does he sit around and fret about it? No, he sets about learning to navigate his room, and to try and remain as supportive and inoffensive to his family as he’s always been. (Some commentators have seen Gregor as an inverted-Christ figure, who becomes less than human in order to die for his family’s sins – a futile act, as his family goes right on sinning after he dies.)

Gregor’s father flings an apple at him (yes, indeed, you will take on my sins), which injures him and sends him into a slow decline. His family forsakes him. Kafka’s description of Gregor’s death is the greatest such scene in literature outside of “Anna Karenina.”

“’And what now?’ said Gregor to himself, looking round in the darkness…The rotting apple in his back and the inflamed area all around it, all covered with soft dust, already hardly troubled him. He thought of his family with tenderness and love. The decision that he must disappear was one that he held to even more strongly than his sister, if that were possible. In this state of vacant and peaceful meditation he remained until the tower clock struck three in the morning. The first broadening of light in the world outside the window entered his consciousness once more. Then his head sunk to the floor of its own accord and from his nostrils came the last faint flicker of his breath.”       

“Samsa” is a cryptogram of “Kafka,” which is a clue to…to what? Kafka was not only family-oppressed, like Gregor, but death-obsessed, throughout his entire adult life. Gregor, however, doesn’t think about death. He thinks about regaining control of his family’s affairs, about reestablishing his footing at work.  Finally, he lies down to die placidly, like an animal.

“The meaning of life is that it stops,” Kafka wrote elsewhere. And what about the next one? Kafka settled that question, as well.

“There is hope,” he wrote, “but not for us.”     

Then I'll just owe you a cock

To-ga! To-ga!

Feeling philosophical today. The last words of Socrates, before he quaffed his hemlock:

"Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius. Will you remember to pay the debt?"

To read about a fictional death presented by an author born today, visit Today in Cynic's Almanac

Today in Death News:

Who's responsible for our "culture of death?"

Content forever now

Helen Keller died on this day in 1968.

"Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence," she said, "and I learn whatever state I am in, therein to be content."




Today in Death News:

Dying the best career move?