Now You're Really Living

Culturally, we seem to like a story about someone who is doomed. People endlessly bang on about Diana, because she died before her time. The whole myth of Camelot around JFK in the US is partly based on the fact that he died young.

This tendency becomes even more pronounced when the victim in some way paves the way for their own tragedy. Be it through the abuse of drink and drugs, with the likes of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Dylan Thomas et al, or be it through deliberate, intentional suicide, like Ian Cutris, Kurt Cobain, Sylvia Plath and so on.

I think it leads to the media obsession with the likes of Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty – after all, these people seem to be disintegrating in front of the flash bulbs of the paparazzi. And this morbid tendency is nothing new – after all, one of the most famous love stories in history is famous for the suicide of the two protagonists.

Which is fair enough, I suppose. This sort of tragedy is a part of life, and such tragedies can make beautiful, if distressing, stories. But it is also good to see/read the stories of those who deal with the tragedies that befall them, and who go away and try to make the most of life. And I’ve come across two such stories recently.

Firstly, there is the film of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. For those not in the know, it tells the story of a playboy editor who is, quite suddenly, hit by a massive stroke and becomes a sufferer of “locked in syndrome”. The only way he can communicate is through blinking – and only using one of his eyes, as the other (in a very distressing scene) is sewn shut. The film has all the hallmarks of a depressing and gut wrenching story. But actually it manages to be uplifting and amusing. The protagonist, Jean-Do, manages to maintain his sense of humour through internal monologues despite his terrible illness. He also manages to author a book despite not being able to speak or move anything other than his eye-lid. Sure, the story ends with his death, and at times Jean-Do seems to despair of his situation, but he managed to live on when so many other people would have given up living long before he did.

There is also the autobiography of indie rock star, Mark Oliver Everett, sometimes know as E. Things The Grandchildren Should Know tells the story of his life, and it is a dramatic story. At one stage E sees a photo showing four generations of his family in the same room. However, today, he is the last surviving member of his family. His book recounts how he found his father’s stiff body on the bed one morning, and how he pulled his father to the ground, tried to perform CPR based on instructions from the 911 operator. The operator clearly gave up when they heard the body was stiff – they knew his father had died. Years later, when he was first becoming an international star, his sister – a drug addicted, suicidal drunk – took her own life. And shortly after that, his mother was told she had terminal cancer. She died too, and after her funeral E found that the nurse who cared for – who kissed his dying mother goodnight in her final weeks and months – had run up huge international phone bills and had disappeared into thin air without paying. Other members of his family also died young – his cousin was on American Airlines Flight 77 on September 11th, when that plane crashed into the Pentagon.

You’d be forgiven for, having read the above summary, that this would be one depressing book. And you can’t get away from the fact that some parts of the book are heartbreakingly sad. But the overriding theme (and not just in this book but in a lot of E’s music as well) is that you can get through these tragedies. He feels like a stronger person because of what he has been through, and he has surprised himself with just how much he has been able to deal with. He acknowledges that he still feels desperately sad sometimes, but like Jean-Do, he has not let tragedy destroy his life.

Neither The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or Things The Grandchildren Should Know are perfect, and both stories show their authors to be as human as the rest of us, and therefore open to petty thoughts, selfish actions and self-pity. But it is great to see that, for all the romance of the doomed youth or the life cut short, the stories of those who are afflicted by tragedy or the stories of those left behind can be just as compelling, and even uplifting.