Not so very dead after all...

The luckiest of Friday the Thirteenths

(Listen to the radio version here.)

In 1888, Ludvig Nobel, brother of explosives manufacturer and dynamite inventor Alfred, died in France of a heart attack. According to History.com:

Thanks to poor reporting, at least one French newspaper believed that it was Alfred who had perished, and it proceeded to write a scathing obituary that branded him a “merchant of death” who had grown rich by developing new ways to “mutilate and kill.” The error was later corrected, but not before Alfred had the unpleasant experience of reading his own death notice. The incident may have brought on a crisis of conscience and led him to reevaluate his career. According to biographer Kenne Fant, Nobel “became so obsessed with the posthumous reputation that he rewrote his last will, bequeathing most of his fortune to a cause upon which no future obituary writer would be able to cast aspersions.”

I learned of this story this week, when a New York Times commentary (gift link) suggested that some healthcare insurance CEOs, reading the unprecedented public response to the murder of a different CEO, could theoretically have a similar change of heart and fix the horrifyingly broken system that has enriched so many of them at the expense of so many bankruptcies and human lives. Like all major corporations, healthcare insurers are legally mandated to maximize profits for their shareholders regardless of ethics or the needs of their paying customers, so I’m not holding my breath.

Reading reports of his own death did nothing to change Mark Twain’s character, but his response to the New York Journal would be misquoted for ever more:

I can understand perfectly how the report of my illness got about, I have even heard on good authority that I was dead. James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine, was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness. The report of my death was an exaggeration.

When I wrote yesterday about my beloved Pileated Woodpecker BB disappearing when a Cooper’s Hawk was in the neighborhood two weeks ago, my suggestion that he was probably dead turns out to have been as premature as those reports of Twain’s death. BB showed up at midmorning today, proving the silliness of thinking Friday the Thirteenth is unlucky. I didn’t have my camera when I first spotted him, but got a few photos in my back boxelder and then on our telephone pole, where he hammered out an announcement to the neighborhood that he’s still in charge.

I rather doubt that BB read my blogpost yesterday about his likely demise—I know he’s not a subscriber, and although I can’t prove it, I don’t think he reads it on the website, either. I know he didn’t hear me talking about it on The North 103.3 FM, because Covid made it impossible for me to record that program in a timely way. So it’s extremely unlikely that my jumping the gun to report his death will make him reevaluate his life and legacy.

Fortunately, BB’s a Pileated Woodpecker, not Mark Twain, not Alfred Nobel, and not someone with a 3-D printer and some bullets. And unlike every person in the healthcare insurance business, BB has never and will never make decisions that could shorten anyone’s life or bankrupt them. Indeed, my own recovery after last year’s breast cancer treatment was faster and easier thanks to his giving me lots of incentives to get up and about and lots of reasons to smile.

I can’t say that knowing he’s safe and well will make my recovery from this stupid case of Covid faster and easier, too, but it’s certainly making me smile.