To begin …
Right, here are some of my death-wishes. Dress code: bermudas and Ts, in this season’s colours, of course. Free drinks all round. No beer, though, only outstanding wine and classy Scotch. Readings from some mildly erotic French 17th/18th century writer. In French, of course.
Some songs by Alex Chilton; better yet, Big Star’s 3rd / Sister Lovers to be played continuously. Lucky draw: you win some of what I used to own! An elegy by someone, maybe Ariane, to be read by a Rilke look-alike.
If only “death-wish” is indeed the mortality-closing equivalent of a year-turning wish (for example, a birthday wish). But alas, “Todeswunsch” has an entirely different (psychiatric) bent.
Obituary:
“A work is finished when we are no longer able to improve it, though we know it to be inadequate and incomplete. We are so overtaxed by it that we no longer have the power to add a single comma, however indispensable” - E. M. Cioran
I died in my sleep last night; it was the most surprising thing that ever happened to me. My last thought, so I’ve been told, was: “Where’s the snooze button?” Always imagined going in a more spectacular way, dying a good death. Despite his relatively long years, he was unprepared as he was called to account for the final time (”What? Now?”). One hopes he doesn’t pick an argument with God again.
He is fondly remembered by his friends as a stubborn, tempermental little shit who gradually overcame his anxieties and dysfunctional background to “give something back to the community”. A fairly strenuous, unsatisfying early career drove him irrevocably to book. A dry sense of humour matched and fuelled his drinking habits and weltanschauung (”I’m not happy when I’m happy”).
Pressed to say a good word amid an unhealthy chorus of over-enthusiastic farewells, a friend quipped “Argumentative, in the best sense of the term, unbearably serious at times but also unpredictably facetious”. “But don’t quote me on that”. He leaves behind his muse, a pure soul who remedied his dyslexic heart with a stream of comprehension and a multi-lingual tongue. A memorial service will be held at some point, after which his ashes will be scattered somewhere - apt for this peripatetic. He remains wanted by der Polizei Berlin.
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