ANA/ANNA

Two sudden deaths

I came across the report issued today by an Arizona news station about the sudden death of one of their reporters, a lovely, lively young woman, only 28 years old. Her name was Ana Orsini. I read about her death a few days ago and thought it remarkable and tragic if only for her youth, but at that time no cause of death was given, and perhaps not yet known. This latest report identifies the cause as a brain aneurysm.

Which triggered a memory from many, many years ago—nearly seventy, in fact. I was living in London at the time, and teaching at a grammar school in Wimbledon. Living close nearby was an eccentric artist I had known for years—he was one of my father’s parishioners when I was in my teens (my father, who set out to be an actor in his early years, had a weakness for eccentric artists). I struck up a renewed friendship with him in London after leaving Cambridge and signing up for a year at a teacher’s training college. I was in my early 20s, a budding poet who had just begun to realize that poetry was no way to make a living, and this artist’s friendship—I’d almost say mentorship—was an important factor in my life.

Like most young men from time immemorial, I’m sure I thought myself immortal, so it came as a huge shock to me to learn that my friend’s oldest daughter—also an Anna, coincidentally, but with two n’s—had sat down in a lawn chair at the end of a happy day on a trip abroad and, just sitting there, had died. She was, as I recall, only 18 years old. I heard later that, like Ana Orsini, she died of a brain aneurysm.

Now 88, I reflect on the capriciousness and injustice of death. I find myself driven to read the obituaries regularly in the newspaper and online, and every time I do I note with some distress that most describe the lives and grand achievements of people younger than myself. Some much younger. I am especially saddened when I read about the death of those I now consider “young” people—for me, that’s anyone under the age of 50. Even, from my perspective, 60. Hard to imagine those two beautiful young women, barely out of childhood, their lives filled with promise that will never be fulfilled! It appalls me especially when I read of children dying—some in senseless warfare waged by mindless adults, some of them, here in America, even shot to death at school.

It's a vain and perhaps trivial thought, of course, but such deaths leave me wondering what I have ever done to deserve these 88 years of mine, and to have, possibly, still more years ahead, while these young people will have missed out on all the opportunities life might have afforded them. They did not get to write their poems, sing their songs. They did not get to meet their mates, have children, grandchildren. Along with all the pleasures, all the sadness, all the opportunities taken and all those missed, I look back on my years with immense gratitude for the gift of life. And I grieve that Ana and Anna, both, were unjustly deprived of it. I grieve, too, for parents suffering the loss of children who predecease them.

Death is there, ever-present for us mortal beings. It’s the monster waiting off-stage, sometimes patiently, sometimes impatient, to consume us all. If wise, we learn to accept and live with the fact of it. But there is nothing fair, or just, or least of all predictable about it. Nothing will change that. Just wait and see…