IN MEMORIAM: Thomas M. Disch

He wrote beautiful prose. He wrote beautiful poetry. The rage and pain and beauty of his work shone like supernovas at sunset. He was viciously original and sometimes just vicious.

He was notoriously hard to deal with — his LJ demonstrates his prickliness and anger. Those may be characteristic of a man who never learned to defend himself against the world or his own deep pain. (No, that’s not just something I say of the honored dead. I have loved, do love, a few people like that.)

He killed himself on Independence Day — surely a comment and a message to us. And his magnanimous, lyrical descriptions of life after death in The Businessman give me hope. Perhaps he has found his way toward that heaven where suicides learn to cope with life.