Some people spend their lives running from the darkness. Writers? We tend to invite it in, pour it a drink, and ask it to stay the night.
Maybe it’s the years spent turning over every stone in the human condition, looking for truth, and finding rot staring back. Maybe it’s the weight of living with your own head turned up to full volume. Whatever the reason, some of the sharpest voices in literature never saw the last page coming, at least not in the way we’d like.
Bukowski made me believe you could wrestle meaning out of filth, that beauty wasn’t the clean, framed thing we were sold. Hemingway taught me the brutality of precision, how to bleed on the page without flinching. Wallace showed me the traps of thought, the unbearable gravity of over-examining the world and yourself. Mishima proved that a life could be written like a novel, every act deliberate, even the last.
And with each of them, their deaths felt, if not inevitable, then unsurprising. Like the same fire that gave them their words was always going to burn the house down.
When they left, they didn’t just leave books behind. They left sentences, fragments that, looking back, feel like breadcrumbs leading to the end.
This is a timeline of some of those voices. Read their words. You’ll hear it too.
1932 — Hart Crane (Jumped from a ship in the Gulf of Mexico)
“One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right to dissect them.”
1941 — Virginia Woolf (Drowned herself in the River Ouse, pockets filled with stones)
“I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time.” (from her final letter to her husband)
1961 — Ernest Hemingway (Gunshot to the head in Ketchum, Idaho)
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break, it kills.”
1963 — Sylvia Plath (Gas oven, London flat)
“Is there no way out of the mind?”
1970 — Paul Celan (Drowned in the Seine, Paris)
“Only in the space of death does one truly live.”
1970 — Yukio Mishima (Ritual suicide—seppuku—Tokyo)
“Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.”
1972 — John Berryman (Jumped from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis)
“Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns.”
1974 — Anne Sexton (Carbon monoxide poisoning in her garage)
“Depression is boring, I think and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave.”
1984 — Richard Brautigan (Gunshot, body found weeks later)
“All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.”
1991 — Jerzy Kosiński (Overdose, suffocation with a plastic bag)
“The principle of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.”
2005 — Hunter S. Thompson (Gunshot to the head, Woody Creek, Colorado)
“Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
2008 — David Foster Wallace (Hanging, Claremont, California)
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
I’ve carried their words like contraband tucked into the lining of my life, ready to pull out when the days got too gray.
But I’ve also carried the weight of how they left. Each one felt like a warning. Bukowski drinking himself to the brink but somehow slipping past it. Hemingway taking the clean, brutal shot. Wallace walking away from a half-finished sentence. Mishima scripting his own ending with the precision of a final draft.
I get it. I get the pull. The exhaustion of holding up the roof when the beams are rotting. But I’m not ready to give the darkness the last word. Not yet.
Maybe the only real rebellion for someone wired like me is to outlive the ending everyone expects. To keep writing past the point where they would have put the pen down. To let my daughters see me tear out every last page instead of letting the fire take the book.
They showed me the beauty in the abyss.
I’ll show them what it looks like to climb back out.
Read this on Substack where it first appeared — if you’re into that sort of thing.
