Two Stories of Death

During my day of doing community service for Hamilton, I was working at a church, sorting books that had been donated for a book sale. The diversity was limitless, from romance to fly-fishing instructions. While looking through all these abandoned and passed on books, I came across one called How Could I Not Be Among You by Ted Rosenthal. I flipped through it, and soon learned it was a book of a dying man’s observations. Ted Rosenthal, who had been diagnosed with acute leukemia and whose prognosis was bleak, had decided to write down his thoughts as he went through his last days. I was able to take the book home with me, and when we read An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce and discussed how it examines the last thoughts of a dying man, I immediately thought of that book.

Owl Creek manipulates the reader, whereas Ted Rosenthal’s biography is the purest form of observation, a man who has nothing left to lose. However, when examined more closely, these books turned out to be more similar than their respective descriptions would suggest. Both are simply attempting to understand the path that leads to death, and while one is a true story and one deceives the reader entirely with its fiction, the end result is the same:  A way for the reader to understand what a dying man endures right before he dies, whether it be Ted Rosenthal, a man who lives in our reality, or Peyton Farquhar, a man who lives in Ambrose Bierce’s reality. The difference is irrelevant, at least to me. While Peyton is completely constructed and controlled by the narrator, Ted has never been freer in his life, and interestingly, these two completely opposite situations create the same effect.  It seems to demonstrate that manipulation can create truth, which is an interesting concept, and one I thought worth sharing.