Words on Wednesday: Death

Words on Wednesday: Death: Not something we want to think about, but…….with YSL, Fignon and Douglas, one must.

I was eating out in Levallois today at a very fine place and had the very best of intentions on going to the show on Death (Vanité) that Pierre Bergé was holding at the old Yves St Laurent digs in the 16th; Bergé being the partner (well, let’s just leave it at that), of YSL, who died about two years ago and was a hunk at 25 but a wreck at 70, the victim one presumes, of the excesses of medical and surgical stuff that our current idols, Hilton, Lohan and Whinehouse (as the French spell it) are subject to or subject themselves to. In any case, this show on Death from Medieval to contemporary times looked kind of interesting. But as I walked from the resto to the bus stop, I saw Bergman’s Grim Reaper from the Seventh Seal up ahead.

Yesterday, my son-in-law, who shares with me a passion for the velo – we divide up the work equally – he rides/competes, I watch – sent me a note saying Laurent Fignon had died (not passed, nor disappeared, nor gone away to a better place, he was a goner, dead, defunct). I’ve been watching the Tour de France since my French “father” in 1953 induced me to listen every night on the French version of his old Philco and I’ve been hooked ever since. I know more about Tours than I’d guess 93.768 % of French folk do, I’ve seen ‘em come and go. (And BTW, I rubbed elbows with Lance 5 weeks ago, really!)

Now we all know from the accounts then and YouTube now that Greg Lemond (pronounced Lemon here, which seems fitting) beat the “Professor” by 8 seconds in the time trial to Paris on the last day in 1989 and “stole” his third Tour victory and that Fignon was crushed. Slight digression: In France, obits are obsequious, really honoring the “don’t speak ill of the dead” dictum, not usually mentioning who survives or the cause of death (a nod to the New York Times) or the fact that the dead guy, especially if important, was a nitwit or twit (thanks UK papers).

So, last night and today, we had endless tributes to Fignon. Now I recall that he was not the nicest of human beings throughout his life but once he got cancer, it mellowed him. Sam Johnson got it right about nothing focusing the mind like an impending execution. This summer, on TV, commenting on the Tour, he could hardly talk and at least once crumped. Thus, I was more sympathetic to his death than usual.

Then I got home and saw that Michael Douglas has throat cancer; Yikes, he’s a lot younger than I. (But why did he have to, like Fignon, announce it on TV?)

Let me end on this essay on death on an upbeat note: When I ran into, no elbowed into, Lance Armstrong in Aspen (both of us buying espressos) a few weeks ago, he was wearing a brand new Live Strong yellow bracelet; OK, he’s a survivor and Fignon is not, but the willingness to turn your misfortune and fortune into doing good is something I have enormous respect for. I wished him well then and now.

Comments

[John Whiting]

In Memoriam Ned Paynter . . . a multi-talented and easy-going genius who made the best of a bum deal

"I don't ask, 'Why me?' Why not me? I don’t feel any grievance. It was nothing personal." http://www.thankyouoneandall.co.uk/letters/ned.htm

In my website of thank-you letters to those who made me into what I was to become, I’ve just finished my tribute to my late great friend Ned Paynter. Ned spent his last fifteen years slowly dying of spinal cancer, to which a lifetime of conscientious jogging might have contributed. As scholar, cartoonist, journalist, photographer, teacher and bon vivant, he kept me perpetually entertained.

I've decided that my major contribution to his memory will be to put his brilliant and eminently readable Ph.D. dissertation, which never found a publisher, on line. I’m half-way through and it's linked to in this tribute.