Isn't it funny where we end up? Often when I pause to think about where I am at a given moment, I'm amazed at how all the events, people, places, things experienced over my life have all led me to this one exact spot. And always, when I think about it, I chuckle because I never would have guessed it, always surprising. Life is like that, uncertain but always forward, like watching a leaf go down a stream, falling down waterfalls, getting caught in eddies, drifting sometimes or speeding down the middle. Where will we go until inevitably we stop? We never, ever know, but then again, that's the fun in it--the ride, from beginning to end, with all its surprises.
I had these thoughts while looking at the grave of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, the heralded novelist of the early 20th century who is most known for The Great Gatsby published in 1925. He's buried at the St. Mary's Church cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. It's a small cemetery, triangular in shape since major roadways run by it, people speeding off to the local mass of suburban shopping malls that surround it in every direction. Fitzgerald was laid to rest here with his family after dying in Hollywood, California, in 1940 at the age of 44 from a heart attack tied to his excessive drinking. With him in the grave is his wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, who died in 1948 at the age of 48 in a fire after spending much of her later life in insane insylums and her last decade away from him. Their only child, a girl called Frances Scott Fitzgerald who was born in 1921, is also there, laid to rest in 1986. On the grave were left coins and someone had placed a pen and pencil across it, acknowledging one of America's best novelists.
Fitzgerald and Zelda personified the hey-day of the 1920s, or what he termed "The Jazz Age" before the Great Depression, when the young and rich lived to excess and celebrity began to take hold. The era of being famous for being a personality as much as for your contribution to society had begun, with the two as the poster children. Not that Fitzgerald lived with it, conscious-free. The Great Gatsby's central character, the Midwesterner Nick Carraway, idolized the wealth of the Long Island rich but also was critical of the immorality that comes about when you live a life above the rest of the world as characters Tom and Daisy Buchanan did. Enter in the title character, Jay Gatsby, another well-off man who pines for Daisy and is ultimately killed by a lower class man who was avenging his wife, the secret lover of Tom who was killed in a hit-and-run accident by Daisy and not Gatsby. All the excess is in the end a big waste and Nick returns to the Midwest dejected.
The Great Gatsby did not catch fire until after Fitzgerald's death and ultimately what had started as a very promising career with his only four novels praised (Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, Tender is the Night and The Beautiful and Damned with The Last Tycoon published posthumously) turned out to be about promise unrealized and a decline into alcohol. He essentially lived his books and like Nick, ended up back with his family, buried not in some vaulted cemetery visited by many and among the rich. And so appropriately on his grave is the epitaph taken from the last line of The Great Gatsby: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Where we all end up is the past but where we'll each end up in the end, we never know and maybe it's for the best, in case we end up by mini malls.
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