Death/Suicide
On July 2, 1961, in his home in Ketchum, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway died of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head. His wife Mary found him and relayed word of her husband's death to the world. Ernest Hemingway was two and a half weeks shy of his sixty-second birthday.
Since the age of nineteen, as an American soldier in the Italian army, Hemingway had flirted with death, both fascinated and frightened by its consequences. Maybe he would have liked to die on that war-ravaged ground surrounded by his dead comrades, his legs perforated with fragments of an enemy trench mortar shell, for how better it was to die as a hero, to leave the world in a noble state of virility, in silent pain.
The greatest story Ernest Hemingway ever composed was that of his own life. It seems only fitting that such a story should end in death, as all eventually do. How he chose to live, how he chose to write and how he chose to die were the accomplishments of a thoughtful man, to whom every peril and peregrination of life was a boyhood adventure, a glorious challenge, an intrinsic test of self-discipline and manhood that must always be met with the utmost dignity, the utmost fortitude and, of course, "grace under pressure."
