Speaking Ill of the Dead

When you heard of the death of Ken Lay, did you feel cheated?

Henry Allen of the Washington Post did as he writes in Ken Lay's Last Evasion:

Kenneth Lay of Enron: America hardly knew you before your trial, but learned after your big-hammer jury conviction that you had left countless suckers broke, employees cheated and stockholders betrayed.
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none of his victims will be able to contemplate .... that he might be spending long nights locked in a cell with a panting tattooed monster named Sumo, a man of strange and constant demands; and long days in the prison laundry or jute mill or license plate factory, gibbering with anguish as fire-eyed psychopaths stare at him for unblinking hours while they sharpen spoons into jailhouse stilettos.
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so many people may well have responded to the news of Lay's untimely death by feeling cheated, by saying that death wasn't good enough for him, by sensing a frustrated craving for revenge burning in their backbrains like a fire in a tire dump.

Everyone knows the story of Enron, the natural gas pipeline company that became a huge energy and trading conglomerate, ranking #7 among U.S. corporations, until it collapsed into bankruptcy, its finances a web of fraudulent partnerships and schemes.

Ken Lay, the smiling, balding son of Baptist minister, rose to the top of the corporate world, became a charismatic civic and business leader in Houston and a celebrated philanthropist until his lust for legacy was undone by the collapse of Enron,  his curtain of lies to employees, analysts, bankers and federal prosecutors  torn away in a federal courtroom where he was found guilty on multiple counts of wire and securities fraud.

Ken Lay's death of a massive heart attack in Aspen saved him from 25 years in a federal prison and may well have saved him from a criminal record.  Who knew that the death of a criminal defendant before his sentencing voids the criminal case against him?

Do you feel cheated when you learn that Lay's Death Complicates Efforts to Seize Assets. and maybe saved his survivors from  financial ruin?

Or do you feel his death a cautionary tale of hubris as Bill Burton, a Texas lawyer, does as he compared Lay to Icarus , that figure in Greek mythology who flew on wings of feather and wax, higher, ever higher, until he flew too close to the sun and his wings melted and he fell to the sea.

"The Enron and Ken Lay stories are best told in an English literature class, or a classics class where you are trying to explain what hubris is all about."

I must admit I never owned Enron stock and I don't know any Enron employees whose retirement assets went up in smoke along with Enron.   I look on the life and death of Ken Lay as a cautionary tale of hubris, self-delusion and karma, yet, I still can feel sympathy for his wife and children who've lost someone they loved.   Was the stress of the prolonged trial and the strain of his guilt too much too bear?  Did he suddenly lose the will to live?  I think so.   

Peggy Noonan says it was a broken heart, a death through sadness.

Is this Shakespearian in the sense of being towering and tragic? I don't know. I think it's primal and human. And I think if we were more regularly conscious of the fact that death through sadness happens we'd be better to each other. I'm thinking here of a friend who reflected one day years ago, I cannot recall why, on how hard people are on each other, how we're all complicated little pirates and more sensitive, more breakable, than we know.

He said--I paraphrase--"It's a dangerous thing to deliberately try to hurt someone because it's not possible to calibrate exactly how much hurt you're doing. You can't know in advance the extent of the damage. A snub can leave a wound that lasts a lifetime, a bop on the head with a two-by-four will be laughed off. One must be careful. We'll always hurt others by accident or in a passion but we mustn't do it with deliberation."

We are human beings, and to each other we are not fully knowable. There's a lot of mystery in life. The life force can leave before we even know it's withdrawing.

The variety of people’s reactions to his death reveals more about more about the people who have them than about the complicated being that was Ken Lay.  Because we are not fully knowable to anyone but God, there is great wisdom in not speaking ill of the dead.  Which is not to say that we don't talk about what they have done or not done, but that in speaking ill, we reveal more about our hearts than theirs.