There are some
notable people from history who died at the age of 48.
I mean, people
in history are supposed to be old, right? If you’re in an oil painting or a
black and white photo, that adds a hundred years to your age. It must take decades
to accumulate the kind of fame that translates to history books and statues, to
odes and tributes.
I’ll give you some context.
Sun Tzu
(author, The Art of War) and Khalil Gibran (The Prophet). Dead at 48.
People as
disparate as Whitney Houston and Al Capone. Dead, 48.
An entire
monarch! Charles l, King of England. Cecil (damned) John Rhodes. Graham Chapman
of Monty Python.
Hey, man, you
guys all died at the age of 48.
My own longevity
benchmarks are people like Elvis, dead at 42, and John Lennon, 40.
Hell, Paul
McCartney has been alive for nearly twice as long as Lennon was.
Forget the 27
Club, those kids with lives swallowed by drugs, booze and bad driving (Hendrix,
Cobain, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones), or even that idiot heroin
addict Sid Vicious – dead at 21, there are swathes of people throughout history
whose lives ended less glamorously in their thirties or forties.
It’s no longer
a tragedy if you make it as far as your forties before dying.
According to a
whack of articles and estimates we are given the expectation that we’ll live
into our 70s in a first-world environment.
That means middle
age, as a concept, should cover about a decade somewhere in our thirties.
The thing is, a
decade sounds like a long period. We’ve grown up with reverence for the 60s, 70s
and 80s as if they’re a cultural talisman instead of a blur of fashion, music,
architecture, art and design. A decade passes like a whim.
I may have a
couple of decades left. Maybe. Too few years to leave an iconic stain on
history, that’s for sure. It could even just be months that I have left.
But you guys
who died at 48 or younger? I beat you suckers.
You’re probably
younger than I am – almost everyone is, these days, but take a moment to consider
that your age is a rug that gets pulled out from under you before you can say “happy
birthday”.
If you’re
looking for me, I’ll be remembering making forts for my plastic figures out of
string and twigs and chewing my teddy bear’s ear. I vividly remember the
toothmarks on my sippy cup, so don’t speak to me of legacies.
I’m still a
child.
49 tomorrow.