Death

 Lance Reddick died on St. Patrick's Day.  Although he was in many things, I knew him as Charon in the John Wick series of movies.  He didn't get a lot of screen time, but when he was on the screen, he made the most of it.

The report of his death claimed that he died of natural causes.   What exactly constitute natural causes got me wondering.  Did he die of old age, of sickness?  Did he die of a genetic trait that took various family members early (Mr. Reddick was sixty-years-old at the time of his death) which, for his family, would be natural?  

But then I got to thinking about how we describe someone's death.  Some are easy:  He was murdered.  He died in the line of duty.  She died giving birth to her child.  We know how those people died, for the most part.

Yet, there are various ways in the English language that we use to relate how someone died.  For example, she died in her sleep.  OK, that's generally assumed that she went to bed and didn't wake up.  But babies do the same when they die of SIDS.  Was she sick?  Did she swallow something and choke to death?  For the most part, that phrase is understood to mean that she went to bed and didn't wake up, that there was nothing nefarious in her death.

Another oft-used phrase is that he passed away.  Passed where, exactly, and away from what? This is another phrase that's used to denote a non-violent death, but it allows for an illness to have taken the deceased.

Some are more colloquial:  He kicked the bucket, for example.

People can get fidgety when describing death.  Surely, for loved ones it's a hard thing to describe a loved one's death.  There's an attempt to soften the deceased's leaving them behind.  But sometimes, family members try to protect the decedent by couching the death in nebulous language that obscures the death that they view, somehow, as shameful.  Take AIDS, for example.  When the outbreak first occurred, there was a lot of shame for people to admit that they had the disease, so to die of it wasn't something that the remaining family members wanted to trumpet.

It's weird how humans address death.  

(c) 2023 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles