A question I’ve been meaning to ask you: Who died the year you were born?
In 1971, the year I was born, the following people died: Louis Armstrong, Nikita Khrushchev, Coco Chanel, Jim Morrison, Harold Lloyd, and Igor Stravinsky.
I know this because we used to get these Year Books chronicling everything that had gone down the year before. We kept them in sequential order, lined up next to the regular Encyclopedia in a cupboard in the hall. I was intrigued by the volume that recounted the events of 1971, especially the Deaths of Notable Persons section. Each dead person received one or two sentences explaining who they were.
I studied those six pages diligently; I can still quote some of the phrases. Chanel was a designer who enjoyed being copied. Stravinsky was a man with a flair for fur-collared greatcoats. Harold Lloyd’s lenseless horn-rimmed glasses were his trademark. Jim Morrison was found dead in the bathtub in his Paris apartment.
I can still see some of the little black-and-white pictures. There was a photo of Khrushchev, pale and waxy in his open casket, surrounded by flowers and women in headscarves. A fat Jim Morrison in Paris, dressed in funereal black leather. World War II hero Audie Murphy, saluting, his uniform weighed down by his twenty-four medals, years before the Texas farm boy went bankrupt and was found dead in the wreckage of his private plane.
There were other less notable people in the list with whom I became acquainted. Like Edna Ballard, leader of some kooky religious movement that didn’t believe in death. And Nathan Leopold, who with his accomplice Richard Loeb murdered a fourteen-year-old boy named Bobby Franks in Chicago in 1924 (the same year Armstrong with his ever-present white handkerchief made his first jazz recording in the Windy City).
Then there were people whose names I can no longer recall: the actor who did the voices for Sleepy and Grumpy in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; the man who was the voice of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio; a highly respected German historian who translated some Babylonian clay tablets that illuminated a code of laws from the nineteenth-century BC, thousands of years before the idea of Jesus Christ even existed; the guy who invented parking meters; the inventor of Yo-Yos; the founder of J. C. Penney’s; and, I almost forgot, these three Russian cosmonauts who, after orbiting the earth for twenty-four days and conducting numerous experiments on one another, landed safely, or so everyone thought, in their space capsule, which I want to say was called Dostoevsky, but when the lid of the spacecraft was opened, all three were dead, yet physically intact, something to do with decompression and a major seal failure.
More than anything, it would be pitiful to die and be nameless, like all the people who ended up in the Disasters section of the Year Book: the forty-five vets who perished in their beds at the VA hospital in Sylmar during the ’71 earthquake which jarred the Los Angeles area; the thirteen wedding guests in a village in France, who, when the floor of the hall collapsed during the reception, fell into an ancient well and drowned in its waters—not even the village’s mayor who committed suicide the next day by leaping into the well earned a personal mention; or the assorted number of passengers strapped into their seats on Bulgarian and Peruvian and Libyan airliners that crashed in dense fog, dense jungle, a sandstorm, all of whom died as anonymous and faceless as their flight numbers.
I fantasized that one day I would be included in those preceding six pages that were far more illustrious—perhaps I would also be found dead in the bathtub of my Paris apartment. Then the question would be reversed and become more difficult to answer: Who was born the year that you died?
It was like I was . . . hypnotized by that list. (Or did the book’s mildewy odor make me a little high, sending me into a minor trance?) There were so many variables determining the rate of vanishing. I hoped that all the entries combined would reveal something extraordinary, illuminate some ancient code of laws. Unfortunately, I never came up with anything more meaningful than the observation—the suspicion—that the terms eminent and obscure are as interchangeable as the terms life and death.
Even so, I liked knowing who had exited the world the same time I entered the world. It seemed that people were entering and exiting constantly, simultaneously.