Odd couples in death
Reflecting on Turner, Ginsburg coincidence
John Turner, a former prime minister of Canada, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a lifetime justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, both died on Friday night.
Dying accidentally together like this has created many historical odd couples, such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the second and third American presidents, who both died with a poignant flourish for the calendar on July 4, Independence Day, 1826. Sometimes one death eclipses the other in the public's capacity for mourning, as when Mother Teresa passed almost unnoticed a few days after Princess Diana in 1997. Likewise, Farrah Fawcett died of cancer on the morning of June 25, 2009, and was the big celebrity news of the day until TMZ reported in the afternoon that Michael Jackson also died that day.
Some death partnerships seem to elevate each other in solidarity with a common cause. The civil rights leader, statesman and “conscience of Congress” John Lewis died on July 17 this year, the same day as the preacher C.T. Vivian, who was also a civilrights leader going back to the inner circle of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Others are schoolkid legends or viral factoids that are not quite true, like Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare, who did technically both die on April 23, 1616, but in different countries, Spain and England, which were using different calendars, so in fact they died 10 days apart.
Some simultaneous exits are curious coincidences, like Signe Anderson and Paul Kantner who both died on Jan. 28, 2016, 50 years after she left the psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane, which they co-founded.
Others seem not to be coincidences at all, but somehow causally related as expressions of intense emotional intimacy, as in the occasional married couple who make headlines for dying sweetly together in ripe old age, or the parents of former star CFL quarterback Doug Flutie, Dick and Joan, who had heart attacks in short sequence on Nov. 18, 2015.
Some just seem ominous. On the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Nov. 22, 1963, C.S. Lewis died of ill health in Oxford, and Aldous Huxley died of cancer in Los Angeles, tripping on LSD.
Few such death partnerships carry the political heft of the latest one between Bader Ginsburg and Turner.
The main contrast is how differently they matter to the wider public. Turner's death casts the mind back to the past. Bader Ginsburg's death does the same, but it also inspires urgent thoughts of the future.
Turner's death has been treated in Canada as an opportunity to reflect on history, on the Liberal Party's changing fortunes. Former prime ministers are under a newly critical eye. No one gets the saintly treatment any more, even in death. But Turner is someone who can be mourned at ease. He was not prime minister very long, less than three months in 1984. He had not been in the news lately, and had seemed frail in public appearances.
His death is an opportunity to appreciate a unique life of leadership, but it will not disrupt Canadian politics.
Bader Ginsburg, on the other hand, has set off a tumult by dying because her vacant seat on the top court hands an opportunity to President Donald Trump to replace her.
“My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed,” she dictated to her granddaughter Clara Spera a few days before she died.
Trump and Senate Leader Mitch Mcconnell indicated over the weekend they intend to ensure that wish does not come true — Trump by nominating a replacement judge in the next month, and Mcconnell by speeding a confirmation vote.
Mourning Bader Ginsburg, therefore, has a sense of political urgency that mourning Turner does not.
Her death is not merely an opportunity to reflect on her role as the liberal grandee of the court, famous for her consensus-building with conservatives like her friend the late Antonin Scalia, and credited by progressives with securing important votes on deeply divisive issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage.
Rather, it is bound up in a presidential election both sides describe as the all-ornothing struggle for America's soul.
This sense of historical import came through in the impromptu singing of Amazing Grace by mourners on the steps of the Supreme Court, a Christian hymn for a Jewish judge in a distinctively American irony. Moments like this illustrate how different America can be from Canada, where judicial appointments are not unto death, let alone so nakedly politicized.
Bader Ginsburg, therefore, is the Kennedy to Turner's Lewis and Huxley. She is the Diana to his Mother Teresa, coming chronologically first and to far greater hoopla. They have become — like the filmmaker Orson Welles and the actor Yul Brynner who both died on Oct. 10, 1985 — footnotes to each other's obituaries.