This was supposed to have been an unremarkable death
Preludes to Nothing This was supposed to have been an unremarkable death. The funeral parlours see them every day, one after the other, like a procession. Good people for sure, most of them, and well-loved, some of them. But ordinary people all of them. People who never invented anything and who never wrote a book and who never got on TV or climbed a rock or flew a plane or made a fortune or robbed a bank or saved some kid from drowning or killed a man. People, in short, who didn’t get reporters like me turning up to their funerals. But aha. You see, that’s the thing. This man—and unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past seven days, I think you know who I’m talking about—had indeed killed someone. True, not a man, as it turns out; it was a woman. But he “had” killed someone. It’s just that he’d never told anybody. Until, that is, about a week ago. When finally, he did. The big brave deathbed confession thing. And to a priest, no less. Well, as you probably know by now, the