Unfinished Business

 

Sue Grafton, who died at 77.

Earlier, I was staring across the room at a couple of shelves of Sue Grafton mysteries.

Remember her? She wrote the “alphabet mysteries” told by the principal character, Kinsey Millhone—a P.I. The first was A Is for Alibi, and she went on through the alphabet, letter by letter. She ended with Y Is for Yesterday (2017).  She did not live to finish the Z novel; she died in 2017; her family says no one will finish the series.

I read almost all of them, starting, I think, with G Is for Gumshoe in 1990. Joyce was once on a panel with her, took her books, got them signed.

Anyway, this got me thinking of all the literary (and other artists) who died before they finished their work.

Norman Mailer died before finishing his novels about Hitler. Dickens didn’t finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Ralph Ellison didn’t finish Juneteenth. And on and on and on ...

So many writers died so early we don’t know what they might have done: Stephen Crane, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and so many others. What might Anne Frank have accomplished?

Others wrote so long ago we don’t know what else they did—or would have done. The ancient Greeks and Romans. Shakespeare. And on and on.

Some writers I know were writing on their death beds: Edwin Arlington Robinson, John Updike.

What we learn from this, of course, is what we already know: Life (and) Death don’t care about your plans. Death will arrive when he will and there’s nothing you can do about it.

All you can do is keep working until you can’t. Posterity will sort you out afterwards, will decide what remains (if anything does), what dies with you—or soon after.

Depressing? Yes. But also liberating in a way ...