The question people always ask me when I tell them the story is whether we finished dinner. No, we didn’t. I knew only one person who would have carried on eating in those circumstances, and he had just died.
My years as a hospice counselor nurtured an abiding curiosity in me about how people face death, including the fantasies and hopes they have about “How I’d like to go out”. Damian Thompson‘s account of his friend’s sudden passing, from which the quote above derives, is both touching and funny. Brian Brindley shook off this mortal coil in a fashion which many of us would find highly palatable.
You are aware of the section from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History in which he discusses the pleasure of a rapid death, I assume. Two lucky Romans he knows of had died in the arms of a circus performer. My theater group made a little show about him and if you’re interested i could send you the song from the show.