The Whole Death Catalog

by Harold Schechter

  MOST SHOCKING DEATH IN A CLASSIC FILM NOIR

  Kiss of Death (1947). In a scene that still shocks with its brutality (even in our age of Saw, Hostel, and other works of cinematic “torture porn”), a cackling psychopath named Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark) ties a crippled old lady to her wheelchair and hurls her down a flight of steps—basically just for the fun of it.

  MOST SURPRISING DEATH OF A CHARACTER YOU EXPECT TO MAKE IT TO THE END OF THE MO VIE

  Million Dollar Baby (2004). For the first three-quarters of this Oscar winner, every-thing leads the audience to expect that they are watching a Rocky-like Cinderella story about a scrappy underdog who ends up as champ. So it comes as a tremendous shock when Hilary Swank’s character is paralyzed by a sucker punch delivered by a vicious female opponent and has to be euthanized by her mentor, Clint Eastwood.

  MOST SHATTERING CARTOON DEATH

  Bambi (1942). There’s no contest in this category. Even though it happens off-screen, the killing of Bambi’s mother is far and away the single most devastating death ever to occur in a feature-length animated movie.

  MOST TRAUMATIC PET DEATH

  Old Yeller (1957). No baby boomer who saw this Disney film upon its initial release has ever recovered from the climactic scene, in which the towheaded young hero has to shoot his beloved pooch (who has contracted rabies following a heroic battle with an infected wolf). Runner-up: the cold-blooded murder of Gertrude the Duck by the evil (and hungry) Count Saknussem in the 1959 film version of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.

  FUNNIEST EMBALMING SCENES

  The Loved One (1965). A highlight of this uneven but intermittently hilarious adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s satirical look at the American way of death is Rod Steiger’s portrayal of the priggish chief embalmer, Mr. Joyboy who communicates with his embalmer girlfriend by arranging the faces of cadavers so that their expressions mirror his own feelings.

  Liberace as the jolly mortician, Mr. Starker, in The Loved One (1965). The Loved One © Turner Entertainment Co. A Warner Bros. Entertainment Company. All Rights Reserved.

  MOST ENCHANTING MOVIE ABOUT SOMEONE DYING TRAGICALLY IN THE PRIME OF LIFE

  Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941). In this thoroughly delightful fantasy, a lovable young palooka named Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery) is killed in a plane crash fifty years before his designated time, owing to a screw-up by a blundering angel. When the mistake is discovered, the angel’s dapper, dulcet-voiced boss (Claude Rains) reincarnates Joe in the body of a playboy millionaire named Farnsworth, who has just been murdered by his two-timing wife. Various amusing and romantic complications ensue. In the end, Joe gets his chance at the title by transmigrating into the body of a prizefighter named Murdoch, who has just been bumped off by gamblers for refusing to throw the fight. Untimely death, marital betrayal, cold-blooded murder, and gangland corruption have never seemed so charming. (Remade in 1978 as the Warren Beatty vehicle Heaven Can Wait)

  Of course, though movies are rife with death, both natural and violent, few films portray it in an accurate way. In Hollywood movies, beautiful people die picturesquely of wasting diseases (as in the 1970 tear-jerker Love Story), while graphic, ostensibly hyper-realistic mayhem (such as the climactic bloodbath in the 1969 classic The Wild Bunch) tends to be “as stylized as the sword-play in Japanese Noh theater” (in the words of critic Jib Fowler).

  One searing cinematic exception is the 2003 documentary Dying at Grace. Directed by Canadian filmmaker Allan King, this critically acclaimed feature records the final days, hours, and minutes of five terminally ill patients in the palliative care unit of the Salvation Army Toronto Grace Health Centre who agreed to share their experience on film. Regarded by its many admirers as the most brutally honest movie ever made on the subject, King’s documentary not only forces the viewer to confront the often harrowing physical and emotional realities of dying but also (as Toronto Star critic Geoff Pevere puts it) “offers an oblique critique of our ritualized, pop-culture denial of this primal human event.”

  Death Lit 101

  Since virtually all great works of literature (along with countless crummy ones) deal with the same two subjects—love and death—it’s impossible to create a manageable list of every major work that deals with mortality. But if you were going to teach a college course called, say, “The Death Theme in Fiction and Poetry,” here are some short stories and poems you’d want to include in your syllabus.

  Leo Tolstoy “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” This harrowing masterpiece is arguably the single greatest literary evocation of the experience of dying. If you want to know exactly what it must feel like to be enjoying a vital and active middle age one day and then suddenly fall sick and die in protracted agony, this is the story for you.

  Katherine Anne Porter, “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” A tour de force of stream-of-consciousness writing, this famous story takes us inside the mind of the eighty-year-old title character as she lies on her deathbed, reliving the high (though mostly low) points of her long and generally depressing life.

  Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death.” Poe’s version of the danse macabre, this classically creepy story about the world’s least welcome party crasher conveys an age-old message: the futility of trying to escape from death’s clutches.

  Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” This famous Civil War story about a Confederate sympathizer who is about to be hanged from a railroad bridge features a nifty twist ending that would not be out of place on The Twilight Zone (which is probably why a cinematic version of it was aired as an episode on The Twilight Zone). But the ending is not just a clever gimmick; it gives the story—which is ultimately about the tricks of perception that go on inside a dying brain—a terrible poignancy.

  Sarah Orne Jewett, “Miss Tempy’s Watchers.” This small gem of nineteenth-century

  American “local color” writing portrays two New England farm women as they pass a long night watching over the body of their newly deceased neighbor. A quietly moving story that evokes a bygone funerary custom while dealing with the ways that the spirits of our departed friends and relatives continue to touch our lives.

  W. W. Jacobs, “The Monkey’s Paw.” Playing on a proverbial theme—be careful what you wish for!—this classic tale of terror (arguably the scariest ever written) serves as an effective reminder that the very human impulse to pray for the return of a deceased loved one might not be such a hot idea.

  William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily.” This story deals with such typically Faulknerian themes as the decay of traditional southern culture and its usurpation by the crass forces of industrialized modernity. But mostly it’s a really cool story about necrophilia.

  Ernest Hemingway, “Snows of Kilimanjaro.” A typically Hemingwayesque writer who has failed to treat a thorn scratch with iodine reviews the moral and artistic failings of his life as he lies dying of gangrene within sight of the titular mountain. The powerful and sweeping tale conveys a vitally important message: never neglect to put antiseptic on a cut while on an African safari.

  Robert Penn Warren, “Blackberry Winter.” In the form of first-person reminiscence about a single day in the life of a nine-year-old farm boy, this story by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and American poet laureate Robert Penn Warren embodies a profound and universal theme: the fall from the paradise of childhood innocence into the adult world of time, change, aging, and death.

  Vladimir Nabokov, “Christmas.” In this ravishing tale, rich in traditional symbols of death and resurrection, a man named Slepstov, grieving for the loss of his recently deceased teenage son, is vouchsafed a vision of life renewed in the form of a metamorphosing insect. Read it and weep.

  Emily Dickinson, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—.” Given the range and depth of her morbid preoccupations, there are any number of amazing Emily Dickinson death poems to choose from. This one, however, is arguably the greatest poem about bereavement ever written, compressing the ess
ence of the experience into thirteen shattering lines.

  Thomas Hardy, “Are You Digging on My Grave?” A darkly sardonic poem, told from the point of view of a dead and buried young woman who hears the earth being disturbed over her head and assumes that someone who misses her terribly is digging on her grave. We won’t spoil the punch line, but let’s just say that the theme of the poem can be summed up in a familiar phrase: how quickly they forget!

  A. E. Housman, “To an Athlete Dying Young.” If you saw the Academy Award-winning movie Out of Africa, you know that this is the poem Meryl Streep recites at the funeral of her dashing great-white-hunter lover, Robert Redford. A timeless classic (the poem, not the movie), it conveys a pretty world-weary message about life (particularly from an author who was still a young man himself when he wrote it): get out while the getting’s good.

  Philip Larkin, “The Old Fools.” One of the greatest of recent English poets, Larkin had (depending on your point of view) either an unhealthy preoccupation with death or an unblinkingly realistic sense of its ultimate horror. In any case, this savage poem about aging and mortality will in no way make you feel better about the prospect of aging.

  Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” Addressed to the poet’s dying father, this stirring plea to “rage against the dying of the light” has the essential characteristic of all great poetry: no matter how many times you hear it, it still has the power to send shivers down your spine.

  Edgar Allan Poe, “The Conqueror Worm.” Playing on the same metaphor used by Shakespeare—“all the world’s a stage”—Poe presents human life as a theatrical spectacle. Only in his case (as you’d expect), the play turns out to be a mad, tormented horror show that climaxes when all the actors end up as worm chow.

  Conrad Aiken, “Blind Date.” With jazzy diction and imagery drawn from the world of tawdry amusement parks and blaring juke joints, Aiken paints a vivid picture of the fleetingness of existence and the inevitability of death. “Baby, it is the last of all blind dates / And this we keep with the keeper of the golden gates.”

  Sylvia Plath, “Death & Co.” This bone-chilling portrait of personified death—represented as two equally creepy figures, one a vulture-headed connoisseur of dead babies, the other a long-haired would-be lover with a seductive smile and a dangling cigarette—is typical of the death-obsessed poet. That Plath ended up with her head in an oven will come as no surprise to any reader of this poem.

  Elizabeth Bishop, “First Death in Nova Scotia.” A deeply moving poem about a young girl’s first experience of death as she views the body of her little cousin Arthur, laid out in his white coffin. Told from the child’s point of view, the poem beautifully captures her confusion as she struggles to make sense of the fanciful explanation that her parents offer (Arthur, they tell her, is going off to be a page in Buckingham Palace) in a misguided effort to protect her from the truth.

  Sharon Olds, “The Exact Moment of His Death.” In her 1992 collection The Father, Olds confronts the physical facts of dying with an unsparing directness. Like the other poems in the volume, this one packs such visceral power that we seem to be standing at her father’s deathbed at the instant his cancer-ravaged body is transformed into a corpse.

  Death’s Poet Laureate

  Back in the 1870s, America witnessed a craze for so-called obituary verse—sappy, sentimental poems about tragic deaths, preferably of innocent young children. The best-known exponent of this wildly morbid genre was Julia A. Moore, aka the “Sweet Singer of Michigan.”

  The daughter of a farmer, Julia began churning out tear-jerking doggerel in her late teens, usually in response to newspaper stories about lethal accidents, fatal diseases, and various manmade and natural disasters. Her first volume, The Sentimental Song Book, appeared in 1876, when she was twenty-nine years old, and became an immediate best seller, despite its somewhat cool reception by critics (“Shakespeare, could he read it, would be glad that he was dead,” wrote one reviewer). Still, she had her literary admirers, most notably Mark Twain, who got such a kick out of the sheer jaw-dropping awfulness of her death-besotted work that he modeled one of his characters after her: Emmeline Granger-ford, author of a particularly atrocious funeral ode in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

  Here’s a sample of the work that has earned the Sweet Singer a special place in the hearts of lovers of truly bad poetry:

  “LITTLE ANDREW”

  Andrew was a little infant, And his life was two years old;

  He was his parents’ eldest boy,

  And he was drowned, I was told.

  His parents never more can see him

  In this world of grief and pain,

  And Oh! they will not forget him

  While on earth they do remain.

  On one bright and pleasant morning

  His uncle thought it would be nice

  To take his dear little nephew

  Down to play upon a raft,

  Where he was to work upon it,

  And this little child would company be—

  The raft the water rushed around it,

  Yet he the danger did not see.

  This little child knew no danger—

  Its little soul was free from sin—

  He was looking in the water,

  When, alas, this child fell in.

  Beneath the raft the water took him,

  For the current was so strong,

  And before they could rescue him

  He was drowned and was gone.

  Oh! how sad were his kind parents

  When they saw their drowned child,

  As they brought him from the water,

  It almost made their hearts grow wild.

  Oh! how mournful was the parting

  From that little infant son.

  Friends, I pray you, all take warning,

  Be careful of your little ones.

  Death’s Playlist

  Okay, full disclosure: we don’t really know what the Grim Reaper listens to on his iPod. But here’s an educated guess.

  Jim Carroll, “People Who Died.” This wildly morbid catalogue of catastrophe stands as one of the catchiest punk recordings ever.

  Rolling Stones, “Paint It Black.” A driving, sitar-laced elegy to a dead girlfriend, ranked number 174 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the all-time greatest rock songs.

  Bob Dylan, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” The moving last words of a dying frontier sheriff, this Dylan classic sounds even better when heard on the sound track of Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, for which it was originally composed.

  George Jones, “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” If you don’t bawl like a baby when listening to this tear-jerking country classic, make an immediate appointment with your cardiologist to see if your heart’s still functioning.

  Eric Clapton, “Tears in Heaven.” This heartrending tribute to the singer’s four-year-old son, Conor, who died in a tragic fall in 1991, is a little mawkish for some tastes. But writing it was clearly cathartic for the grieving father.

  Kansas, “Dust in the Wind.” A catchy pop acknowledgment of our cosmic insignificance. Hokey but strangely profound.

  Blue Öyster Cult, “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.” Ranked by Rolling Stone magazine as one of the “500 Greatest Singles of All Time” (number 397 to be precise), this rockin’ tune about the inevitability of death has only one flaw: it needs more cowbell.

  Warren Zevon, “Life’ll Kill Ya.” The title track of Zevon’s 2000 album, this characteristically unsentimental song about mortality proved sadly prescient: two years after its release, Zevon was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

  Hank Williams, “I’ll Never Get Out of the World Alive.” Another weirdly prophetic song that was the last ever recorded by the “hillbilly Shakespeare.”

  Lucinda Williams, “Fancy Funeral.” This heartfelt plea for simple, inexpensive burial might make the Grim Reaper’s playlist, but it certainly isn’t going to be on the iPod of a
ny member of the National Funeral Directors Association.

  Loudon Wainwright III, “Doin’ the Math.” Though Wainwright is known for his sardonic humor, there’s nothing funny—at least to a fellow baby boomer—about this cool-eyed contemplation of encroaching old age and all-too-imminent death.

  Johnny Cash, “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.” There are many versions of this traditional folk song, but few are as memorable as the one recorded by the “Man in Black” not long before his own death in 2003.

  Jan and Dean, “Surfin’ Hearse.” With lyrics worthy of Cole Porter (“My dad thinks there’s nothing worse / Than my big black Cadillac surfin’ hearse”) and a melody that blends the Beach Boys’ “Little Deuce Coupe” with Chopin’s funeral march, this toe-tapping paean to a “big black Cadillac” funeral car converted into a bitchin’ beach buggy easily rivals “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena” as one of Jan and Dean’s finest musical achievements.

  A Death Song That

  Could Make Even

  John Wayne Cry

  Arguably the most two-fisted tear-jerker ever composed, “The Cowboy’s Lament”—aka “Streets of Laredo”—is guaranteed to make even the manliest buckaroo choke up. There have been many variants, but here are the complete lyrics to the traditional version: