Life is the name of the game...

It is my opinion that everyone has a death that has profoundly affected them. A death which destroyed them at the time, and a death for which the passage of time soothes the pain but does not erase it. A death that changed everything after it. A death that forever put an entire section of a life firmly in the realms of the past.

If a person does not have something like this then they are either very young indeed, or very lucky indeed. Some people are profoundly unlucky, or perhaps of a 'certain' age and have more than one.

You might suppose that for me, that death might be the American in the bath, or the Scouser shot dead, the Irishman whose kidneys, liver, heart and lungs all gave out. You might suppose it to be the musician with lung cancer or the entertainer with an incurable disease. You might even suppose it was the crooner who died on Christmas Day. You might think it any number of people whose names and faces are familiar to us all, who will be a certain kind of immortal forever.

You would be wrong, for the death that destroyed me so completely was not of a handsome young stranger with the voice of an angel and the soul of a demon, nor of the lonely blonde with a dependency on sleeping pills.

Unfortunately for me, there are no books written about this person. Perhaps if there were, I would know her better. As it is, her funeral did not draw thousands. Her grave remains mercifully untouched by graffiti, although is yet, four years after her death, to have her name put on it. Her name is not familiar to people in Karachi and she doesn't appear on any 100 Greatest lists published by anyone.

But for me, her death destroyed me more utterly, more completely, than any zonked out film star or smacked up rock star. You don't know her name, but how I have loved her.

 

( More underneath, should you wish to continue )

Life is the name of the game...

It is my opinion that everyone has a death that has profoundly affected them. A death which destroyed them at the time, and a death for which the passage of time soothes the pain but does not erase it. A death that changed everything after it. A death that forever put an entire section of a life firmly in the realms of the past.

If a person does not have something like this then they are either very young indeed, or very lucky indeed. Some people are profoundly unlucky, or perhaps of a 'certain' age and have more than one.

You might suppose that for me, that death might be the American in the bath, or the Scouser shot dead, the Irishman whose kidneys, liver, heart and lungs all gave out. You might suppose it to be the musician with lung cancer or the entertainer with an incurable disease. You might even suppose it was the crooner who died on Christmas Day. You might think it any number of people whose names and faces are familiar to us all, who will be a certain kind of immortal forever.

You would be wrong, for the death that destroyed me so completely was not of a handsome young stranger with the voice of an angel and the soul of a demon, nor of the lonely blonde with a dependency on sleeping pills.

Unfortunately for me, there are no books written about this person. Perhaps if there were, I would know her better. As it is, her funeral did not draw thousands. Her grave remains mercifully untouched by graffiti, although is yet, four years after her death, to have her name put on it. Her name is not familiar to people in Karachi and she doesn't appear on any 100 Greatest lists published by anyone.

But for me, her death destroyed me more utterly, more completely, than any zonked out film star or smacked up rock star. You don't know her name, but how I have loved her.

 

( More underneath, should you wish to continue )