THE SNIPER’S BULLET, THE tunnel wall, the needle, the gas oven: death may be a great equalizer, but the afterlife is another story. If your tragic demise is a defining moment in the history of a generation—so much so that the phrase “defining moment” is invented to describe it—if the children you left behind are emblems of a society of orphans, if you have a postage stamp or are sometimes sighted on an island near the Bermuda Triangle, you will certainly spend eternity behind the velvet rope. At least there you can relax. There Jimi Hendrix looks down Princess Di’s dress as she leans over him to tell JFK a story. There Sylvia Plath takes a delicious bite out of Tupac. After Courtney Love, Janis Joplin seems like no trouble to Kurt Cobain. John and George jam with Elvis while they wait for the others. Oh, good, here comes Marilyn with a bottle of champagne—if Jim Morrison doesn’t get to her first.
Nothing stops it. Not beauty, not humor, not talent, not wisdom. Not youth or health or goodness or fame or love. Not people who need us. Not a job to do. When a beautiful princess dies, everybody knows this all at once, instead of one person crying alone on a cold kitchen floor. What a pleasure it is to grieve in this vast communal way, piling teddy bears and roses at the site of the beautiful corpse, writing poems and watching programs on television for decades to come. To imagine that there is some fairy-tale sense to be made, some reason, some inevitable truth, as if our deaths come from our lives as our voices from our throats. Down the hall, Spalding Gray is telling the story of his suicide to Vincent van Gogh and Anne Frank. It is so good to see them laughing.
Even if I get by the bouncer with a smooth line and a fake ID, it’ll be just as awkward seeing them there as it was when we were all alive. Allen Ginsberg won’t recall the time I went home with him and Orlovsky after the reading and stayed for a week. Jerry Garcia won’t remember whispering Happy Birthday into the microphone during a jam at Englishtown Raceway the day I turned fifteen. But Grace Paley, who defined not a moment but a whole calendar for some passionate young women of the late twentieth century who learned to write by reading her and following her around, if she is there I know she will recognize me, will jump up, arms wide, and say, Marion!