July 06, 2006
On Ken Lay
When I heard of the death of Ken Lay yesterday, I wasn't sure what to think. He'd been found guilty in one of the biggest corporate scandals in recent history, and was awaiting sentencing to the tune of at least 20 years. At his age, that was akin to a death sentence.
Then he died of a heart attack.
He wasn't an evil man. (We save...or should save...that designation for cold blooded murderers and their ilk.) He rose from having nothing to having more than anyone could dream of. He got greedy. A lot of people lost money because of the decisions he made. He got caught, and was preparing to receive his punishment.
Someone I ride the train with made a derisive comment that Lay had found a way to "get out of" going to prison. I am sure he is not alone in his lack of sympathy. Yet I can't help but feel sorry for him and his family. While I don't think he should have gotten away with what he did, he ultimately paid the price with his untimely death. This ordeal obviously took a great toll on him. And no matter what the rest of us may say about him, he had a family who loved him.
Peggy Noonan's take:
Putting aside all judgments and conclusions, all umbrage, outrage and indignation, and all debates on who was most responsible for the Enron scandal--putting all those weighty and legitimate concerns aside--isn't it obvious that Ken Lay died of a broken heart? We forget that people do, or at least I forget, but they do.
His life was broken and would never be healed. Or if it was to be healed it would happen while he was imprisoned, for the rest of his life, with four walls to look at. All was wreckage around him. He died, of a massive coronary. But that can be another way of saying broken heart.
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.
Beautifully said.
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He didn't die of a heart attack. Jack Bauer killed him.
Hell, it's better than the libs' theory: the Bush Administration had him killed.
Posted by: Wyatt Earp at July 8, 2006 11:41 AM
