C’s poem about Christopher Hitchens ends with the lines
The thing about death
is how efficiently
it silences.
Those lines sprung to mind again on my N-train subway commute the other morning. Two people along from me a woman was listening to Whitney Houston at full blast on her headphones. It was a couple of days after Houston had died, and there was her distinctive voice accompanying Queens-dwellers on their way into work: I Will Always Love You, I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me), Where Do Broken Hearts Go? The woman with the headphones wasn’t crying but was visibly upset as she listened. It annoyed me how little notice everyone took, or at least how consciously they seemed to be pretending they couldn’t hear.
On one hand it was a reminder that artists secure some kind of afterlife through their creations; they can be read, listened to, watched, after they have died. But that also makes death's silencing all the more dramatic. The carriage was full of an immensely powerful voice that would never sing again.
I then noticed that the woman sitting in between me and the Whitney Houston fan was reading Hitchen's autobiography Hitch 22, published soon before he died last year.
That’s two rather morbid posts in a row. I’m five months pregnant. I wonder if that has anything to do with it: amplified hormones and all that.
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