Death, too, is what happens....

Death, too, is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

In memoriam Professor Stephen Gardner

Yesterday I asked a professional colleague whether she were looking forward to our association's next annual meeting. "Have you talked with Stephen yet whether he'll accompany you again?" And she replied:

Stephen died November 10th. He had a fall at home while he was alone and it caused a brain bleed that was left unchecked until I got home at 6 p.m. He never regained consciousness. Although he received brain surgery, his brain stem was damaged. Brain stems cannot be repaired. We removed life support and he moved on to the next phase of existence at 2 a.m.
    I still find it unbelievable. I’m spending Christmas with his mother, who is 95 years old and devastated to lose her only son. He was 61.
    You can see his obit (I guess you still can) at shellhousefuneralhome.com. [Yes, you still can: go there and search obituaries on "gardner."]
    So, I’m not really looking forward to much or anything right now.
    But, I’ll be there.

I, too, am planning to be there.

In memoriam Professor John E. Smith

A few minutes later yesterday I received an email from the assistant to the Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Yale University:

Hi Morris,
    Just thought you should know the sad news that John Smith passed away on December 7. He was 88, visiting his daughter in Washington, and it happened very quickly. We are planning a small funeral tomorrow [i.e., today] with a burial in the Grove Street Cemetery, but a large memorial service probably in March. Sorry to be the bearer of this news.
    Love from both to both,
    Pat

Pat became John Smith's secretary during my junior year at Yale, while I was his bursary student in the department. The first "both" refers to her and her husband Alan, who were very kind to me, sort of my big siblings away from my childhood home in California, the second "both" to me and my wife, who took Pat and Alan to lunch in New Haven in the summer of 1976.
    The last time I saw her or Professor Smith was at another lunch in New Haven, in June 1989, when I bought meals for them and a classmate (another of John Smith's bursary students), on the occasion of our 25th Yale Class Reunion.
    As I recorded on November 1, my last correspondence with Dr. Smith was to bear to him the news (unwittingly) of the death of his good friend, Professor Errol E. Harris.
    Professor Smith's obituary appears in The New York Times. I have walked by the Grove Street Cemetery many times.
    John Edwin Smith may have been making other plans when he died. I had certainly been making other plans, considering whether to ask him about something I was reading in Yalom's novel, The Schopenhauer Cure:

JES, do you agree with the opinion that Schopenhauer was a greater philosopher than Fichte and Hegel?

In memoriam a young person

And yesterday, too, as reported in The Durham Herald-Sun this morning:

Chapel Hill—...a UNC Chapel Hill freshman hospitalized at UNC Hospitals since November 20 with swine flu, has died.
    Hospital spokesman..., contacted late Wednesday night, could provide no further details, except to confirm the death.
    [The] 18-year-old dramatic arts major from Rhode Island had been on life support before she died, apparently from complications of the H1N1 virus.
    [Her] illness had garnered national attention, and thousands of well wishers had been following her ordeal on a Facebook page titled "Prayers for Lillian."

Who's busier making other plans than a college freshman?

Missing the bus stop....

But it was this morning that this codicil to Lennon came to me. It came to me on my quarter-mile walk back from getting off the bus to the stop that I'd missed because I'd been...busy making other plans.