If people mean anything at all by the expression
“untimely death”, they must believe that some deaths run on a better schedule
than others. Death in old age is rarely called untimely — a long life is
thought to be a full one. But with the passing of a young person, one assumes
that the best years lay ahead and the measure of that life was still to be
taken.
History
denies this, of course. Among prominent summer deaths, one recalls those of
Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, whose
lives seemed equally brief and complete. Writers cannot bear the fact that poet
John Keats died at 26, and only half playfully judge their own lives as
failures when they pass that year. The idea that the life cut short is
unfulfilled is illogical because lives are measured by the impressions they
leave on the world and by their intensity and virtue.
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