News of WP Kinsella’s death hit me this AM like a beanball to the heart.
The first feeling I experienced was sadness at the loss of a Canadian literary
icon. His folksy, earthy stories of First Nations people and baseball helped me
at an early age to make some sense of Canadian culture, history and baseball,
one of my favourite sports.
My second feeling upon hearing the news was a mixture of curiosity and
fear. The curiosity comes from learning that the man ended his own life
yesterday, September 16, in Hope, BC. Strange name for a place in which to end
one’s life, yes? The timing of his death, though, seems stranger. Keep in mind
that he chose to die, electing to undergo doctor-assisted suicide. He’d
suffered from diabetes for years, according to an obit
in the Montreal Gazette, and perhaps also from lingering after-effects of a
head injury suffered when a car hit him back in 1997. Maybe these health
problems had finally caught up to him. After all, he turned 81 this past May. I
hope he and his family achieve a measure of solace.
Now for the fear. A part deep inside me can’t help but worry there’s
another reason he chose this particular autumn to die. In the mid-Eighties, I
read a short story of his that scarred me like raised cleats from a dirty
slide. Called The Last Pennant Before
Armageddon, it details the Chicago Cubs’ march toward their first World Series
victory since 1908. Concurrently, the global political landscape is heating up,
with the USSR and US edging toward nuclear war over an invasion of Sri Lanka. The
story ends ambiguously, with the Cubs only a few outs away from advancing to the
World Series, leading in the game and threatening to score more.
You see where I’m going with this.
The Cubs are good this year. Really good. They ran away with their
division, and on paper at least they are huge favourites to cakewalk their way to
the National League Pennant. Yes, as every baseball pundit loves to remind us
plebes, the playoffs are a different beast entirely, and anything can happen. But
I don’t get the feeling the Cubs will fold. I get the feeling they’ll
keep rolling all the way to the World Series.
Now, I’m not saying Kinsella knew something we don’t know. But I do wonder
what was going through his mind as he was (surely) watching the Cubs win at a
.630 clip this year while no other team has won even 60% of their games. I wonder
why he chose this fall as his death date. And I wonder about his thoughts on the
international political landscape. I don’t see any parallels in terms of mortal
superpower enemies these days. There’s no Russian Bad Guys to the American Good
Guys. The closest analogy may be ISIS vs the west. But that doesn’t offer the
same WWIII-type fears as the tense climate of the Eighties did.
I remember reading The Last
Pennant Before Armageddon at night at my grandparents’ farm, and looking
out the window at the dark sky and the horizon and expecting to see the
mushroom cloud any minute. Sure, I was a 13-year-old kid who, after being terrorized
by the apocalyptic films The Day After
and Threads, feared the threat of
nuclear war practically every day. Those days may be gone, but residues of
those fears will always linger, no matter how old I am or how stable the
political landscape. Because I am an anxious person by nature, and I fear for
the safety of my loved ones. Maybe I just wish The Last Pennant Before Armageddon hadn’t ended so ambiguously.
Kinsella’s posthumous book, Russian
Dolls, is due out in 2017. Rest in peace, WP, while I hope to be able to read
in peace.
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