James Agee: A Death in the Family

Surely, the author could not have known that the titular death would be his own.  And yet, considering the depth of spirit that is evident in this work . . . perhaps he did?  It's entirely plausible that he knew this would his final word, and that the reader would be left behind to put it together in a way that makes sense.
Thus is death, and thus is grief.   They take their version with them, the dead, their director's cut, their final draft. What we are left with is fragments, our version of their story, and it is that which we mourn.  And just as the humans in this book will each hold a different Jay in their mind, so will each reader be left to wonder forever what Agee's final edition would have been.
My Maternal Grandfather will die this week.  He fell, and there's really nothing to do but inter him in palliative care, and then eventually in a hole in the ground in Kansas.  Why was he the way he was?  I have my version, my explanation why a decade ago he decided he never wanted to speak to me again.  Well, he got his wish.
But it is the privilege of the living, and of the reader, to have the last word.  To look at the fragments of stories left behind, and to declare them, as in the case of Agee, good, beautiful, necesary.