In his review of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Leonard gave us a personal glimpse of what he called “a fact to which we can’t ascribe a meaning,” i.e., death, adding that for “those of us for whom this life is it, these moments all the more precious because they are numbered, after which a blinking out as the black accident rolls on in particles or waves; those of us who have spent our own time in the metropolitan hospital Death Care precincts, wondering why they make it so hard to follow the blue stripe to the PET scan, especially since we would really prefer never to arrive, to remain undisclosed; those of us who sit there with Didion in our laps at the oncologist’s cheery office, waiting for our fix of docetaxel, irinotecan, and dexamethasone, wanting more Bach and sunsets.”

I wish that Leonard had had time for more Bach, more sunsets, but I’m grateful that he’s left us with a body of work in which his distinctive and irreplaceable voice continues to amuse, instruct, and inspire.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/11/hbc-90003811