Premature Obituaries Two

For Part 1, click here.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834)

English poet and philosopher, best known for his poems “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In 1816, he overheard his name mentioned in a hotel by a man who was reading aloud a newspaper account of a coroner’s inquest. Intrigued, he requested for the paper, and was told that “it was very extraordinary that Coleridge the poet should have hanged himself just after the success of his play (”Remorse”), but he was always a strange mad fellow.” Coleridge quickly responded: “Indeed, sir, it is a most extraordinary thing that he should have hanged himself, be the subject of an inquest, and yet that he should at this moment be speaking to you.” In fact, there was a man who had fallen from a tree in Hyde Park; and his sole identification was his shirt which bore the mark “S. T. Coleridge.” Coleridge believed the shirt was probably stolen from him.

Marcus Garvey (1887 – 1940)

National hero of Jamaica; Black nationalist and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). After having suffered a stroke in January 1940, he read in the Chicago Defender dated June 10th of the same year his own obituary, negatively describing him as “broke, alone and unpopular.” And as a result, he suffered another stroke and died.

Hiroo Onoda (1922 – )

World War II Japanese army intelligence officer stationed in the Philippines. After the war, he survived three decades hiding in Philippine jungles in the sincere belief that the war had not ended. He, along with three fellow soldiers, continued their battle, executing many local Filipinos in the process. Every effort to convince him that the war was over was considered an enemy trap. Officially declared as dead in 1959, he only yielded himself in 1974, when his commanding officer was called out of retirement to personally order him to surrender. He was accorded a hero’s welcome upon his return to Japan and wrote an autobiography “No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War,” describing his years fighting a war that was long over.

Fidel Castro (1926 – )

Revolutionary leader who led Cuba from 1959 until his retirement in 2008. In 2003, it was discovered that his draft obituary could be accessed from the CNN website without a password. Apparently, it had used Ronald Reagan’s as a template, describing him as “lifeguard, athlete, movie star.”