I am 52 years old today. What a weird sentence to type, much less experience first-hand, because my internal monologue is that of a nerdy, off-putting teenager.
For many years, on or around by birthday, I post a list of famous people who died at the age I just surpassed. Morbid? Absolutely. But also utilitarian. Memento mori, and all that.
It’s mostly an exercise to ground myself in chronological reality and it often ends up feeling surreal. But it also makes me glad I am alive even if I’ve not really accomplished anything, compared to these famous/infamous dead people. I guess longevity is an accomplishment in a world trying its best to crush and murder you in a thousand ways.
What really fueled me doing these lists was turning 40 and realizing that was the age John Lennon was murdered in December 1980. Forty had seemed so adult, so mature, so old. Then I raced past 40 myself and I understood that Lennon, despite his global fame and fortune and career, likely felt much the same as myself and innumerable others at that age.
Am I a fraud? Will I be found out? How am I 40? I’m not a grown-up! Someone find me an adult!
The gray hair, diabetes, high cholesterol, PTSD, and now osteoarthritis in both hips, knuckles, and spine say *I* am one of the adults. But man, that’s old people shit. I am a healthy young baby, not a decaying husk!
Some years, the Morbid List isn’t especially interesting to me. Other years, it’s filled with notable people and celebrities with some level of meaning and importance to me. And bear in mind, this list and its reasoning and who is chosen and not chosen for inclusion is entirely my doing for my reasons, my enjoyment, my edification, my morbid curiosity.
Some big names are not on here, like James Gandolfini, a fine actor and star of the well-regarded TV series “The Sopranos” which simply wasn’t my thing. D’Angelo and Carl Wilson also didn’t make the list despite being famous and croaking at age 51.
Let’s begin, and the first name is a major figure in my life – Napoleon Bonaparte, someone quite famous but that few Americans are actually familiar with and what he actually did. That period of history has fascinated me since middle school, and fuels a controversial opinion: While it’s not an easy black-and-white case study, I believe Napoleon and the French were the “good” guys at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Anglo-Dutch-Prussian victory was bad for Europe and the world in the long run. Napoleon was definitely a mixed bag, but the empire he created did help hasten the introduction of the noble ideas of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment across Europe.
Anyways, my shallow and pedantic nerd explanations are for another time (or message me to ask what the hell I am talking about). Here’s the full list, mostly in order of how I found the names online:
- Napoleon – He was actually 5-foot-6, the average height of a Frenchman of the time. The “Napoleon” movie by Ridley Scott was one of the greatest cinematic disappointments of my life. Scott is English so I assume this was some latent revenge measure two centuries later.
- Roger Maris – Long ball hitter, but unfortunately a New York Yankee
- Marcel Proust – Madeleine memory enjoyer to the tune of 4,215 goddamn pages
- Molière – 17th century France’s Larry David
- Rainer Maria Rilke – Austrian poet loved by Jim Harrison, and me
- Robert Shaw – Did you know the “Jaws” actor was an award-winning writer, too?
- Bill Evans – Jazzy McJazzface
- Honoré de Balzac – The best fantasy football team name I ever saw was “Lick My Balzac” and the “do not forget to Honoré de Balzac” memes about fellatio also amuse me. Also, this list so far is running 50 percent Frenchmen!
- Ethan Allen – A boy from the Green Mountains, namesake of a mid-scale chain furniture, and overall weird dickhead.
- Pliny the Younger – Another fucking writer, this one Italian and nephew of the older Pliny that croaked trying to save people from the Mount Vesuvius eruption.
- Jan van Eyck – I cannot keep track of all the goddamn Dutch oil painters
- Antonin Artaud – Jesus, another Frenchman. Why did they all die at 51? This one is a darling of film, theater, and philosophy students. He created the Theatre of Cruelty, so you can bet he’d love what’s going on in the world today. A Virgo, naturally.
- Anthony Wayne – And another Revolutionary War madman. This one has a university in Detroit named for him instead of furniture.
- The Singing Nun – the first woman on this Bechdel Test-failing list, and it’s the goddamned Singing Nun of “Dominique” fame. Dreadful song. Sorry, ladies. The list will improve.
- Walter Reed – Mosquitoes hated to see him coming.
- Karl Von Clausewitz – Along with Sun Tzu, the most misunderstood and least-actually-fully-read of the famous and influential military theorists, and that’s partly because his early 19th century writing is dull and stale as ancient dog shit.
- Paul Verlaine – If this 19th century French bisexual poet had a cartoon doppelgänger, it would be Jerry Smith from “Rick & Morty.” He’s mostly remembered as Rimbaud’s older married lover and sparring partner – Verlaine shot him at one point and did time for it – he also was an excellent Symbolist and Decadent movement poet. Like Jerry Smith, he also could have defeated Pissmaster.
- Calamity Jane – Finally, a genuine baddie on the list.
- A. Bartlett Giamatti – Did you know actor Paul Giamatti’s father was commission of Major League Baseball, and was the one that struck the banishment deal with Pete Rose? He died of a heart attack a week after the deal was announced, and just six months into the commish job. His boy is one of my favorite actors of all time.
- William the Silent – For the name alone but also started the revolt that eventually produced an independent Netherlands. Took him starting the Eighty-Year’s War to do so. Defense contractors must have loved him.
- Alice Prin – If you are not familiar with Kiki de Montparnasse then get thee to the Wikipedia.
- Heywood Campbell Broun – Early 20th century newspaper sportswriter, labor leader, Lefty, and charter member of the Algonquin Round Table – my favorite piece of literary furniture.
- Madame de Staël – Our eighth French person on the list, and ironically she died at 51 just as Napoleon, her staunchest foil. She was one of history’s most fascinating and complex figures.
- King William III of England – He’s the namesake half of the College of William & Mary in Virginia … like, he literally chartered the school in 1693. The only older U.S. college is Harvard, by 60 years. I got to visit the college in 1996 during a trip to Colonial Williamsburg and loved it.
- Billy Carter (pictured at top) – Our fourth person who name is derived from William, and the only one who was a sibling to President Jimmy Carter. In addition to Billy Beer, he also shilled for something called Peanut Lolita, which to the disappointment of horny gross conservatives is not an underage girl but a thick peanut-based whisky liqueur. He also apparently got caught up in influence peddling with Libya.
- John Singleton – He wrote and directed “Boyz and the Hood” at age 24, earning an Oscar nomination. What was I doing at 24? Writing about a county fair scandal over pigs being given beer before show competitions in rural central Ohio.
Quite the list, eh? All of these men and women died at age 51, which was once such an elderly age to me, but isn’t now that I am starring at the number after having completed 52 years on Earth and am now working on my 53rd. I did peak ahead to next year and it’s got some huge names, too.
After all the years of assembling such lists, and my own health and body starting to show signs of wear and abuse, I admit I don’t feel quite as youthful. I imagine every single person on my list bitched and moaned about the same things, too: Aches, pains, soreness, exhaustion and general malaise, pills and medicines and doctors, exercise, dieting, bills, taxes, government bullshit, neighbors, children, parents, relatives, pets, the weather, prices, work, laundry, etc.
That’s really the unifying thing at middle age, regardless of what year or century or place you lived or died. We all endure the same bullshit in life, then the party is over. But we got to enjoy, to varying degrees and fairly or unfairly, that same party. Which reminds me of my favorite Warren Zevon quote, from not long before he died of cancer at age 56 in 2003: “Enjoy every sandwich.”
It’s a simple thought that hides a vast profundity that I now consider the meaning of life.
(I love Zevon’s music, but he doesn’t make my list, if I am lucky, until 2031.)
So while memento mori is something to keep in mind, just as important is its mirror opposite: Memento vivere.
Remember to live.
–30–
Unpaid Bills 
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