All throughout 2020 — since March, anyway — a song rattled around in my head: "People Who Died," by the Jim Carroll Band. It was a minor hit in the early 1980s; maybe you know it. Carroll, the punk-poet author of
The Basketball Diaries, wrote it as a sort of tribute to friends he knew who died before their time. Some of them met wild ends: a guy killed by bikers, a woman who jumped in front of a subway train. Others left Earth via less dramatic but nevertheless heartbreaking routes. My favorite line goes:
Bobby got leukemia, fourteen years old / He looked like sixty-five when he died / He was a friend of mine. The chorus goes: