I wonder what the perfect age is for dying....

Munch - Death in the Sick Room

I wonder what the perfect age is for dying, so that your obituary says or your friends say, “He was such a young man…”

Clearly I have passed that mark.

I imagine it’s a max somewhere in your 50’s, where you seem to be gunned down in the prime of your life.

"To An Athlete Dying Young" is a poem (XIX) in A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (1896). It is perhaps one of the most well-known poems pertaining to early death; in this case, that of a young man at the height of his physical glory.

Published in the period between the two Boer Wars, the poem gained even more popularity during World War 1, as many saw it as a poignant lament for the lost generation of so many bright, young men, cut down in their prime.

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

This will not be my epitaph, nor is it in any way fitting. As well, I doubt I will die pretty soon anyway; the dying young was just the fact that I had to rule out as a part of my obituary.

I spoke with someone yesterday who has already written theirs. She just thought she should put the facts straight and save their kids the trouble and bother of writing one. I never thought about it until they brought it up and I decided that this seemingly never ending blog can serve as the world’s longest obituary.

I can’t imagine writing my own, although there was an artist I knew years ago in Baltimore, Jonas Fendel, who wrote his own. He knew he was dying (as if we don’t) and decided to write a quite funny one based on his notes for his students. It was short and humorous, and it just sounded like him.

I only know that when I go, no one will say, He was such a young man…..”