Ever since I heard about Heath Ledger’s death the Doors song has been playing in my head. I had some other ideas for my next blog post but I kinda don’t feel like being amusing now. When you work in a mortuary you hear a lot of different stories about how people died. We’ve had everything from car accident victims to people shot by the cops to suicides, murders, freak accidents, and many natural deaths. When the contract on my desk is for someone younger than me, especially children or parents of small children, I feel horrible for those families.
My industry is a service industry where the first thing we do when someone walks in the door is offer comfort. We learn to be calm in the face of others’ pain. I have to admit that even working where I do, where you’ve either seen or heard everything, I was totally shocked by Heath’s death. An accident maybe I could understand but his manner of death is shocking. Knowing how this stuff works though, I’m not going to speculate how he died. I’ve heard so many people already talking about how he died of an overdose. I’m sure if he did, it was an accident. But then there was talk of him suffering from pneumonia. Well, I’ve had pneumonia enough times to know that it can kill you when you don’t even look that ill to others. And certainly, we get a lot of people at the mortuary every winter who have died from pneumonia or the flu. Funny to think that in this day and age, with the things they can do medically, that pneumonia can kill. But it does. Every day.
In the Bar Story, I have a character named Macaire whose story is just ramping up. He’s enigmatic and is supposed to be a good guy, an angel. But he’s a rogue, bent on revenge, so he’s not coming across as a good guy. He has secrets that are revealed at the end of this storyline and when all is revealed and resolved, I was going to redeem him and try to find him a mate. Since Macaire’s physical representation is Heath Ledger, I’ve decided that at the end of his storyline, he will make peace with Nyx and with his fellow angels and ask Marius the Archangel, to send him to the Afterlife. I would rather end his story on a bittersweet peaceful note now that this has happened. I just don’t think I can continue to write Macaire when I have to visualize Heath’s face as the character.
It’s also rather odd that I decided recently to ramp Macaire’s story up so that I could complete it soon. Foreshadowing in a way I hadn’t expected I guess. Macaire’s story is one of the more original ones I’ve come up with recently so I was very excited to work on it. My enthusiasm is a little deflated now but the show must go on. I’ll be sad to see Macaire go. I am sad that Heath Ledger has.
Next time I may talk about the email notification I got that Andrei Andrei had posted a new video on his blog. Woot!
