Guy Yedwab

Victoria Anderson

9/24/06

Death is not something which I normally like to think about myself, but like many things, death

comes upon us unexpectedly. Sometimes that's because death happens, claiming a friend or an

acquaintance or a public figure, but at other times its a thought, or a book, or a piece of art. The piece

of art which prompted my recent intellectual grappling with death is an untitled production still which

hangs in the lobby of the Tisch Building on our campus. Three days a week, four times a day, I pass by

this photo, and it always sucks the voice out of my throat. I can't speak when I see it; I can't think of

anything other than the overwhelming feeling that I am looking at a crystal-clear representation of

death. There lies a young girl on a bed with an empty cup next to the hand of hers that dropped it; a

clear image of unexpected death. How terrifying is it for a man with dreams to have to face the chilling

idea that death might not claim him at the end of a fruitful life, but rather in the middle of an action as

simple as having your cup of tea! As an actor, as a writer, as a political dreamer, as a man who may

want a family some day, the idea that I might die before realizing any of that is crippling. I have seen

almost no photographs, no hung paintings, no sculptures with quite the same emotional kick as this one

strikes me in the stomach with.

It's a very confusing fear about death; it's probably based on the assumption that if I feel like I

died at the right time, having added something to the world, death will be okay; as though my life is a

sculpture which I am constantly working on all the days of my life, and when I die it is the end of

preparation and the final museum viewing. The philosopher William Benjamin saw this view when he

famously said, “The work is the death-mask of its conception.” It's a comforting idea, that says that

even though I'll be dead, it will all have amounted to something. It also holds me to a higher standard

of living while I'm alive, knowing that deep down I will be judged for having lived my life beautifully.

That, perhaps, is why I am so involved in the rituals of death; it's the final punctuation of a life
beautifully lived. How frustrating is it to reach the end of the play (for instance, the play I saw a week

ago named 'Nami) and have the good work of the playwright fall apart because of a weak ending?

Great sentences refuse to trail off; great paintings do not skip the final detailing; I cannot die without

that final punctuation mark. I love the last words of great people: whether it is the beautifully

constructed irony of Oscar Wilde's “Either the wall-paper goes, or I do,” or Karl Marx's self-assured

“Last words are for people who haven't said enough in life.” The saddest last words I ever remember

are Che Guevara's last words: “Don't let it end like this—tell them I said something.” Does it really

matter that his last moments in life were filled with terrible regret of writer's block finishing his last

moments? Probably not. If there is an afterlife, than theoretically he has eternity to get over that regret

(and realize that his life will be judged by more than it's ending; Che's live has not been cheapened by

that last failure). If there is no afterlife, then nothing will matter to him at all. As Rosencrantz aptly

points out in Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard (which compares life to being

characters onstage, and looks at the tragedy of two bit-roles), people imagine that being dead will be

terrible because in the end they are imagining being alive instead. They get hung up on the idea of

being trapped in a box underground so much that they forget that their consciousness is literally going

to be erased.

For myself, I would hate to think that my consciousness would be erased. Just thinking about it

causes my breath to catch in my chest, as if by holding my breath now I could somehow avoid the

future that is to come. I think of all the things I want to do, all the things which I will never have time

to do and which, once I am dead, I will never have the chance to do again. Sure, I want to act. I also

want to write. I also want to be a Spoken Word Poet. I'd love to be a Supreme Court Justice. I'd love to

be a mathematician. I'd love to be in Congress, or the Presidency. I'd love to rewrite the laws, rewrite

history, rewrite knowledge, rewrite people's souls. Just to do it once will not be enough – I want to do it

again and again until I've left an incredible mark on the world that will put my awkward name among

the greatest names in history. And once I've died, no matter how much I've done, I will have lost the
opportunity to do more. Ironically, the more I do while I'm alive, the more I could have done after my

death; and the less I do while alive, the less I will have achieved.

But if my legacy is large enough, I now realize, my very legacy will only grow in time. I

recently read the play Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde by playwright Moises

Kaufman. It's a play which uses the life and death of Oscar Wilde to examine persecution of

homosexuals and artists. In the afterward, fellow playwright Tony Kushner ends with the words: “Look

at the legacy that Wilde's industry has left behind, from which so much has descended, including this

beautiful play.” (emphasis mine). From which so much as descended... those words refer not to Oscar

Wilde's immediate influence on humanity. Those are not the ripples in the pond that Oscar Wilde made.

Those are the ripples that each of those ripples made; those are the indirect influences that Oscar Wilde

enabled, but which he didn't even have to be alive to see. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. He did not write

The Lion King. The Lion King is based on Hamlet, and has influenced its own generations of kids.

Oscar Wilde did not write Gross Indecency, but its appearance in 1990s America is every bit as

influential as the appearance of The Picture of Dorian Grey in his contemporary Ireland and England.

Because while Oscar Wilde himself is but mortal, Wilde's art and his legacy are immortal for as long as

people find his legacy worth recording and for as long as his legacy inspires them. The fact that I'm

writing an essay which references him is a testament to his timelessness.

Every time I see the name of a dead person and do not know who they are, I feel an incredible

sadness inside because I know that they will be forgotten. Once I heard of a story (the name has been

erased with time) which posited that the afterlife was a mansion on an island, and the dead on the island

got to stand based on how many people remembered them and how deeply they were cared about by

the living. Famous people (a Kennedy or a Martin Luther King) who left deep impacts got to stay in the

living rooms, and as one faded from the living collective one faded further and further out of the

mansion and toward the edge of the island until suddenly you went out to sea and your soul was lost

forever. How many people have been lost out to sea forever; how many people are only barely kept on
that island thanks to the small honors that one may get in life? Every time I pass down the 5 freeway on

the way to San Diego, I see a stretch of freeway called the Gunnery Sergeant John D. Basilone

Memorial Freeway. I've never met a person who could name John D. Basilone, or make any sort of a

comment as to who he was. A little investigation, however, brought me to the Congressional Medal of

Honor citation that Sergeant Basilone received after his tour of duty in the Pacific during World War

Two: where he was critical in many tight scrapes and saved many lives by his own strength and

courage. Maybe when I decided to look him up, he stepped a little further out of the water on that

island. I don't know. But it did make me realize that when we try to honor the dead it is so that their

effect does not become nothing once they are dead; the way that we hope that we won't become nothing

once we are dead. Our legacy is the only thing we leave behind us except decaying biological material

locked in a wooden box under some green acre nearby. That's why in war especially, there is such a

need to honor the dead; even if there is no time to bury, even if there is no time to think, there is at

some point a moment of remembrance, and the letter written home to secure his legacy at war to the

people at home. That's why in How To Tell A True War Story by Tim O'Brian, Rat needs to share the

story of their time at war with his dead friend's sister: in hope that his legacy will be a little stronger, a

little more real.

And that's what strikes me in that production still hanging in the Tisch Building. This girl is

trapped in the moment of her death, and every person who walks by gets to share that moment of her

death. And in the background, a pair of strangely ominous men salute her body. That mysterious

moment of death, and that mysterious salute, makes me want to know so badly how she died, why she

died, who killed her or what was in her tea, and most of all: what legacy is she leaving behind that

those two men are attempting to honor. She is not an old woman; she does not look fully into adult-

hood. So what impact does the life of this Girl, Interrupted have on us all? Is it because even an

incomplete work of art, like the unfinished final novel of an author or the aborted sketches of a

perfectionist painter, has something to tell us all?

God, I hope so.