While I was trawling the Internet one day, I came across this comment on the blog of a jazz musician: \u201cI\u2019ve often joked that every musician\u2019s secret fantasy is to die on the bandstand, at a ripe old age and after a really good solo, and that\u2019s not too far from what I\u2019d actually like to happen a long time from now.\u201d<\/p>\n
This made me wonder what a writer\u2019s secret fantasy might be. I was still mulling that over when I remembered William F. Buckley\u2019s obituary. Buckley founded the conservative magazine National Review <\/em>and wrote more than 50 books. When he died in 2008, he was found at his desk at home. His son thought he might have been working on one of his columns.<\/p>\n Buckley\u2019s strikes me as a really good death, but then I too am a writer. I\u2019m a lifelong workaholic as well.<\/p>\n People who aren\u2019t wedded to their work have good deaths too. When my father was 84, he and my stepmother went to a concert one afternoon, returned home, had dinner and went to bed. In his sleep, he had a massive heart attack. I doubt if he came to for long enough to realize what was happening.<\/p>\n It was hard on the rest of us because it was unexpected\u2014Dad had been pretty healthy up until then\u2014but I was sure it was the way he would have wanted to go: quickly, at the end of a day he\u2019d thoroughly enjoyed. No hanging around for prolonged goodbyes.<\/p>\n On the other hand, hanging around is exactly what my husband did. After a fall and a devastating head injury, he survived in a coma for a week. Our family gathered in his hospice room every day. One by one, we said our goodbyes while alone with him, even though he couldn\u2019t hear us.<\/p>\n We also supported one another in new ways. I felt closer to our children and grandchildren than at any other time in my life. <\/p>\n I think that, for my family, my husband\u2019s was a good death. But he\u2019d <\/em>have preferred to be conscious, to launch his own opinions into the conversations we had as we sat around his bed and to reminisce with us about good times and bad. He\u2019d also have wanted to say his own goodbyes.<\/p>\n So what is <\/em>a good death, if there is such a thing? I guess we all have our own ideas about that, if we can bear to think about it. Personally, I\u2019m with Woody Allen, who once wrote, \u201cIt\u2019s not that I\u2019m afraid to die, I just don\u2019t want to be there when it happens.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m not big on goodbyes\u2014they\u2019re too painful\u2014so I\u2019d like to go out the way Buckley did, all of a sudden and in the midst of doing what I love.<\/p>\n As long as I get to finish my last sentence. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While I was trawling the Internet one day, I came across this comment on the blog of a jazz musician: \u201cI\u2019ve often joked that every musician\u2019s secret fantasy is to die on the bandstand, at a ripe old age and…<\/span><\/p>\n