The Art of Martin (Fennelly)

Ars Moriendi, if you can’t guess by the name, is the art of dying.
See, people used to believe this crazy hoopla about how you composed yourself on your deathbed. If you were submissive and penitent you’d go to heaven, if you were choleric and cursed God, you’d go to hell. Crazy stuff.

Enter Martin Fennelly. Sure he’s a sports writer. But, in the cocaine arms-race that is modern sports (my suggestion; not Fennelly’s) a lot of bodies fall to the wayside. Fennelly’s job is to capture that moment of death, the ars moriendi and give us that “one little morsel” that births a human connection with the deceased.

His grim obsession with everything morbid took on an interesting spin with me. Depictions of the dead and dying are fresh in my mind from a book I’m reading for another class: “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War”. Basically, it catalogs first-hand accounts of death, dying, coping and mourning through 250 soul-crushing pages. Not unlike Martin Fennelly.

Ars Moriendi is what popped into my head when Fennelly explained trying to capture human moments from the deceased. Collectively humans want to frame death in a way that is comfortable with our worldview and reassures us that the dead are going to a better place.

What’s ridiculous to redundancy is his funereal humor and preference for man shorts – the kind that dangerously suggest the faint borders of the fur all men bare.

Fennelly got into writing because of a program his school had when he was a teenager. A subversive paper that allowed him to use satire to critique anything he wanted, and it was circulated within the school. Our cushy society and school system wouldn’t abide so much as a discussion of ever making this reality again. Maybe that’s part of the reason print is dying.

So this is the guy: the court jester whose responsibility it is to tell the truth about unpleasant things.

With a death toll around 6 – no wait! – 7 – sure it isn’t higher? – Fennelly is perfectly qualified to divulge the secrets of mortality. Apparently, that secret is just to do your best. Cope the best you can and do your job the best you can.

The loved ones of the deceased he told us about were often forwarding with information. It was just as shocking to us as to him that these people would want to tell a scummy journalist about the recently deceased. And yet, at the moment of most profound tragedy, it helps to tell that person’s story just one more time.

As he said, it’s probably the last, and for most people, the only, time your name will ever be in print.

And majordomo? Who uses that word? Bonus points.