Gil the Wonder Cat, Generalissimo of the Sekrit Army charged with the defense of the Last Homely Shack East of the Manhan, visited the the Horrible Place of Pain and Terror this week.
It was a routine visit – or so the attendants said – that began when Ellid, blessed be she despite her almost complete lack of fur, claws, and the ability to purr, swooped in the front door of the Shack, scooped Gil up, and shoved him into a Transport Pod. Before the Generalissimo could do more than squeak, Ellid had whisked him out the front door, placed the Transport Pod into the passenger seat of her less than luxurious automobile, and headed toward the Place of Horror and Terror and Pain.
Just why Ellid was doing this was not immediately apparent to the Generalissimo. He entreated her several times for more intelligence and a decent sitrep, but all he could get out of her was a great deal of cooing about how pretty he was, fingertips rubbed across his whiskers, and the occasional laugh when his questions rose from quiet to loud. She seemed to find his bewilderment more amusing than anything else, and eventually he decided that his best option was to hurry up and wait.
Alas for Gil, scarce had he settled down in the Transport Pod when Ellid pulled up at the Place of Horror and Terror and Pain. This enemy installation, which had formerly been secure but not overly so, had moved to a location that was a veritable Eben Emael by comparison, and the great strategist knew that resistance was futile.
Worse, the installation had infiltrated by The Ancient Enemy, or so his sensitive and highly trained nose told him. Only one of these accursed creatures was in evidence, but the scent of them was thick, and though he attempted to sally forth to scout the area when Ellid opened Transport Pod to assure him that all was well, th edanger was evidently enough that he had to be returned to the security of the Pod when another of the Ancient Enemies walked in the door.
Fortunately for all concerned, it was about then that one of the installation’s attendants arrived to escort Ellid and the Generalissimo to a private room where the Generalissimo could take stock of the situation and alter his plans to suit the changing terrain. The attendant was kind enough as such things go, and after a brief examination she left Gil and Ellid alone to wait the Bringer of Pain and Terror and Horror.
Gil put this time to use – never let it be said that he has neglected the Watch that all of his kind keep for their humans! – by first shedding a large quantity of fur as a diversion from whatever perils awaited. That done, he set out to explore the floor area, the sink, the jar of treats for The Ancient Enemy (yuck!), the computer monitor, the paper towel rack, the hand sanitizer, and the bag of Deliciousness for Felinoids (yum!). He paused for a moment to survey the room, then took a chance and lept onto a higher shelf to investigate the Kleenex box and several miscellaneous objects that seemed harmless but might prove a danger to himself or Ellid.
This was when Ellid noticed what he was doing. She laughed again even though he had played no tricks and done nothing even slightly amusing, and if he hadn’t been so intent on analyzing a scale used to weigh small animals (like cats, which is how the attendant knew that the Generalissimo himself weighed about eleven and a half pounds) he would have been on alert when the Bringer of Pain and Terror and Horror walked into the room.
This person, who outwardly was nothing more than a small, youngish human of the female persuasion, proceeded to examine the Generalissimo from stem to stern, as his Navy brethren might say. She checked his eyes, forced open his mouth to get a look at his teeth, then felt up his kidneys (normal) and bladder (semi-full, just in case he needed to mark his territory). At this point Ellid asked a question, to which the Bringer announced to her, and the attendant, and anyone in earshot, that she “felt some poop” in the Generalissimo’s digestive tract.
Well! As if that was anyone’s business but his! Before Gil could object, however, the Bringer had flipped him onto his side and begun the Ritual of Agony. The attendant held him still while the Bringer stuck the Instruments of Terror and Pain and Horror into one leg, then the other. He didn’t make a sound – soldiers know when to keep their mouths shut, no matter how much it hurts – but he was not happy, not at all, and the look he gave Ellid made this clearer than the water in the Great Porcelain Bowl he drinks from on a regular basis no matter how much she shouts at him.
After that it was time for a strategic retreat into the Transport Pod. The Generalissimo allowed himself to be conveyed homeward, and ne’er had he been gladder to be safe within the four walls of the Last Homely Shack East of the Manhan. He scarcely noticed when Ellid put the Transport Pod back into storage, then slipped quietly away to the Mysterious Place Where She Goes Every Day to Do Bast Only Knows What, so worn out was he by his ordeal.
The rest of the day was spent recuperating on Ellid’s bed, close to his boon companion and fellow Guardian Diamond Girl. He had found his strength again by the time Ellid returned, and he made sure to monitor her progress as she voluntarily let herself get wet (why?), then headed into The Room Where It Happens to listen to incomprehensible Weird Sounds and tap away at a keyboard. Being a Guardian Generalissimo is not easy, especially when it involves visits to the Terrible Place of Horror and Pain, but let it never be said that Gil the Wonder Cat shirks his duties.
(Translation: I took my cat to the vet for his annual shots and a physical. Ain’t pets grand?)
Fortunately for all concerned, especially Gil, he’s in fine shape aside from the annual Summer Molt that seems to plague Norwegian Forest Cats. However, his recent ordeal got me to thinking about illness, especially among the young, and our country’s obsession with a trope I’ll refer to as Teen Death Books. Maudlin, drippy, sappy though these stories of suffering, inspiration, and death may be, there’s no denying that we’ve all read them, or seen them adapted on-screen, or heard the three-minute version on the radio, or —
Oh, don’t look at me like that. Unless you’ve somehow avoided every bit of American pop culture since the early 1800’s, you most certainly have seen (or read, or heard, or possibly even written) a Teen Death Book/Movie/Song. Remember A Separate Peace? Eric? A Walk to Remember? Ever hummed along when that old chestnut “Rocky” comes on the car radio? Wept till your eyes were sore at Love Story? Seen a battered copy of Agnes and the Key of Her Little Coffin in an antique store and wondered what it was about?
Congratulations! Every single one of these fine entertainments is a Teen Death Book. Think about it: each and every one features a physically attractive, charismatic, precocious teen or just past teen who seems to have everything until a massive physical problem of some sort crops up, slaps our Hero/ine upside the head, and causes the youngster at the center of what passes for the narrative to expire at a tragically young age. Friends/loved ones are left devastated, yet oddly determined to live in a way that would make the expired teen happy and proud “because that’s what they would have wanted.”
Never mind that what the average dying teen really wants is, y’know, not to die. Oh no, a Dying Teen in one of these narratives has to die for a Reason and not just because sometimes very young people get cancer/Spanish Influenza/galloping consumption/the creeping crud. We aren’t talking the idiot girlfriend who runs in front of a freight train to fetch her boyfriend’s class ring from the car here, guys We’re talking the sort of Life Lessons that one learns only from cheerfuly enduring a long, painful, and tragic end with a smile on one’s lips and a song in one’s heart, and don’t you dare forget it.
Also, keep in mind that modern medicine, as great and effective as it for so many conditions, can’t touch whatever happens to the literary Dying Teen. Leukemia...chronic illness...injury...something unspecified that kills yet doesn’t effect the sick person’s good looks in any way, shape, or form…rare tropical disease…genetic time bomb…it always ends the same way. No matter how hard the doctors strive, how valiantly the main character strives to beat the Grim Reaper and live a normal life, how many community hopes and wishes and dreams surround the sufferer with rainbows and unicorns and fluffy fluffy kittens/puppies/grypflyches/coatamundis, the story invariably ends with the Unhealthy Teen expiring prettily after teaching the secondary characters the True Meaning of Life, Love, and (sometimes) God.
Like I said, admit it. You’ve read or seen one of these. You probably even were moved by one. There’s no shame in this, even though the vast majority of them are maudlin to the point of bathos.
Tonight I bring you three fine examples of the Romantically Dead Young Person, one Good, one Bad, and one Ugly. Please feel to add to the list in the comments, since great googly moogly there are a lot of these rolling off the presses and unreeling at the Heck Piazza Dodecaplex and downloading into e-readers across this great land of ours:
The Good:
Death Be Not Proud, by John Gunther – I initially hesitated to include this memoir in this diary, even as a Good Book. John Gunther, a foreign correspondent best known for his Inside Europe series, was an excellent writer indeed. Inside USA is still an excellent look at post-war America, and the Inside Europe series is invaluable to anyone wanting to know more about what the Continent was like before 1939.
Gunther brings the same skill set to the sorrowful task of chronicling the death of his only child, Johnny. A brilliant, scientifically gifted teen who’d already done adult-level work before he was halfway through high school, Johnny was diagnosed with brain cancer after a stiff neck failed to respond to treatment. Gunther’s bleak, unsparing look at how his son faced his own mortality and went down fighting is a minor classic, and is still frequently taught in high school. It’s everything a Teen Death Book should be and all too often isn’t.
Then again, it’s easy for a sensitive teen to read it, freak out over finding that a stiff neck can mean something deadly, and spend several months believing that Death Is Imminent. I know this from personal experience, and no, I will not tell you more. Some things you’ve got to take on faith.
The Bad:
Six Weeks, by Fred Mustard Stewart — Fred Mustard Stewart originally trained as a concert pianist, which is why the publicity materials for his best-known book, The Mephisto Waltz, included a 45 recording of him playing Liszt’s fiendishly difficult concert piece. His love for classical music also came through in this novel, which is about a Dying Girl, her brave mother, and the married California politician who comes into their lives in time to bring hope, love, and laughter (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) into their lives for the child’s final month and a half.
The idea of a romantic novel about a married man committing emotional adultery with the mother of a terminal cancer patient is questionable enough. Add in that the child, Nicole, is a brilliant ballerina who refuses treatment so she can perform the role of Clara in The Nutcracker, then collapses and dies on the subway home right after her triumphant performance, and the whole plot goes from “sentimental and silly” to “are you serious?????”
If that weren’t enough, the book was made into a stunningly bad movie starring talented dancer/figure skater Katherine Healy as the Dying Teen, Mary Tyler Moore as her cosmetics tycoon mother, and, no lie, Dudley Moore as the married politician. That there was zero chemistry between the Moores (no relation, thank God and the angels), Healy was a toothy and talentless actress, and the leading man was almost six inches shorter than the leading lady, did not improve the already ridiculous plot. Worst of all was probaby the “wedding ceremony” between the Moores conducted by the Dying Child, never mind that Dudley Moore’s character is already married to someone else….
The So Ugly You Want to Chew Your Arm Off at the Shoulder Rather Than Wake the Cosmic Horror You Find On the Next Pillow After a Night of Too Damn Many Absinthe, Everclear, and Boone’s Farm Apple Wine Cocktails:
The Entire Oeuvre of Lurlene McDaniel — I first became aware of the works of the author one blogger dubbed “Slurlene” during a trip to the late, lamented Sage Books one fine afternoon. These books, all of which had soft focus cover photos of beautiful, clear-skinned teens and plots about the said teens struggling with chronic health conditions, were both fascinating and horrifying, and I had a good laugh about the latest fad in lousy teenage literature.
Then I did a little digging into Deathlene’s works, and found that her popularity was not a fad, oh goodness gracious no. This kindly septuagenerian, who started writing about young people facing health crises when her own son was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes, has churned out a series of carefully researched, slickly written, and numbingly formulaic Teen Death Books since the early 1980’s. Her current book count is over seventy (and counting), her body count considerably higher, and if the bravely dying kids at the core of each volume weren’t enough to ensure their popularity, the veneer of religion that gives each one what she calls "the human element—the values and ethics often overlooked by the coldness of technology” most certainly does.
Rather than single out any one volume from Deathlene’s bibliography, let me just leave you with a few of her choicer titles so you’ll have a taste of what your kids, or their friends, or someone in their high school class, or down the next block, is reading instead of Harry Potter or The Hunger Games or an old fashioned trashy romance:
- When Happily Ever After Ends
- Baby Alicia is Dying
- The Girl Death Left Behind
- Sixteen and Dying
- Someone Dies, Someone Lives
- Mother, Help Me Live
- Telling Christina Goodbye
- Let Him Live
- Goodbye Doesn’t Mean Forever
- Mourning Song
- A Horse for Mandy
- Why Did She Have to Die
And so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and….
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What Teen Death Books have made you cry? Scream? Fling the book through the nearest plate glass window? Did you ever see Six Weeks? Read Death Be Not Proud and think every single tension headache was the beginning of the end? Collect Lurlene McDaniel books until the shelving in your knotty pine rumpus room collapsed from the sheer weight of the sap? Pass the Kleenex, take a hit or two of Visine, and share….
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