Who would you write or gossip about when they die?

We have had the Terre’Blanche and Lolly Jackson deaths so far this year. The press that followed proved that more is said about the person or personage after his death. Well I remember the “truths” about incest that emerged after novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell’s death (brother to the perhaps more famous Gerald Durrell). It was strongly alleged that he had had an incestuous relationship with his daughter Sappho. She ensured that her journals and any documents on hertherapy sessions pertaining to the alleged incest could only see the light of day once she died. It is not clear in any of the documentation that there was any incest with her father. It is a matter of psychoanalytic interpretation but it made world literary news after Sappho Durrell committed suicide. After an intense legal battle with the Durrell family after her death, portions of the documents — none of them conclusively proving incest — were released, initially in issue 37 of Granta, which had a rather less than euphemistic cover title, “They fuck you up”, a quote taken from the British poet Philip Larkin, who was commenting on what family does to a person.

There was a sudden huge surge of interest in Terre’Blanche possibly involved in sodomy and that that act had perhaps led to his death. There seemed to be an air of disappointment when that was allegedly disproven. We love smut.

The dead themselves do not speak. The wakes they leave do. The wakes of course are made by people. In the case of Lawrence Durrell, his reputation and surviving family will always have that shadow of alleged incest.

Why do so many of us talk so much about people when they die; and I am talking about things that we were not prepared to say before their death? The legal reasons possibly involved are obvious. But the one more relevant as an insight into human nature is that the dead cannot defend themselves. This is the nature of gossip: it is not said when the person being derided is around.

Of course, in the example of Lolly Jackson, his lifestyle and brash, quotable comments were already well known before his death. The tweets and media headlines that followed his demise are what carry the amusing smut, the gossip and jokes, about him. This amuses many people and gives them something to do that appears meaningful, or existentially pisses on the cathedral door of meaning, declaring there is no meaning. And that death should be joked about. Perhaps it should be. It beats years of dealing with grief through expensive therapy. Many will hope that more juicy gossip will emerge now that neither Lolly Jackson nor Terre’Blanche can shoot off their considerable mouths in their own defence. Why? Gossip rags like People, OK and Hello! don’t answer that question; they just exploit readers’ love for it. Without stories, and each one of us contains at least one unwritten story, lives would be even more a bric-a-brac on the mantelpiece where the dust need never be swept away.

With regard to some of my story. My father was retrenched from an international car firm, Peugeot, in the late seventies. He had held a senior position. I was told his retrenchment was because of apartheid: Peugeot was pulling out of South Africa in keeping with international sanctions. That made a lot of sense to me as a teenager. The truth emerged after my father’s death: he had been fired because he smelled of alcohol every day and was eventually fired after repeated warnings. This truth also made sense because I well knew his spectacular drinking bouts. He had sworn my mother to keep this secret from me. Why did I need to be told the truth after his death?

A close member of my family was once adopted by a woman when he was very young, in another country. She was in the medical profession and held in high regard. She was divorced and when I finally met her she told me she was a divorcée and one day she would tell me the details. I did not probe. Divorce for a long time has been more common than condoms. Much later I was told the gossip, which turned out to be quite juicy. Her husband went on holiday to The Netherlands, had a sex change, and came back home as a woman, more or less, expecting things could carry on as normal.

Ah, imagine life without scandal, gossip, stories. The image of a shell comes to mind. An empty shell washed up among the millions of others on a beach, its shell-ness a metaphor for meaninglessness until it is snatched up by a delighted child and added to her bedside collection, glinting with fresh discovery.

So who would you like to write about, gossip about, joke about, once that person is dead? Obama? Malema? Winnie? Sol Kerzner? Your mother-in-law? Or would you rather that dead person be left in peace: “left in peace” being an emblem ringing like a temple bell with transcendence and certainty in a world that, instead, increasingly celebrates “flatland“* jokes?

* See paragraph three of the link for a contextual understanding of flatland. Also Google “Ken Wilber flatland”.