The Quiet Death of Norm MacDonald

or, life belongs to the living but death belongs to the dead

We didn’t even know he was sick.

This seems to be the common refrain from Norm MacDonald’s famous friends. I don’t know if his non-famous friends knew he was dying of cancer for several years, but I do find this an interesting moment in celebrity.

It’s not uncommon for celebrities to keep their illnesses secret from the public, but Norm MacDonald went further than that. I think it’s fair to assume he was friends with people like Conan O’Brien and not merely work acquaintances, so it does seem unusual to hide the fact that he was dying of cancer from his fellow comedians who he had known for decades.

I also wonder how much of this has to do with MacDonald’s very specific status as a celebrity. I think it’s safe to say that, without youtube, most people would no longer even remember who Norm MacDonald was. By all accounts, his greatest moment of fame ended nearly 25 years ago. Yes, he continued as a standup on the road for the rest of his life.

But how many standups can you name that only did standup and not movies and TV? MacDonald tried his hand at both, to varying results. Even with all his appearances on Letterman and Conan, I do think he’d largely be remembered as someone who got fired from SNL 25 years ago for making jokes about his boss’ friend.

Despite a career in entertainment, though, MacDonald remained aloof from the public and from fame itself.

I mean, probably he wouldn’t have minded being a lot more famous. It’s hard to imagine someone whose career depends on an audience not wanting a larger audience.

But the fact that this seemed to perpetually escape him and that he never seemed to mind that much may be why he chose not to share his dying and then death with the world.

I won’t try to get into MacDonald’s head or assign meaning to what he did, because I’m not a therapist, and I definitely wasn’t his therapist. I’m just some guy on the internet who happens to have a (potentially unhealthy) preoccupation with death and dying.

My birthday was yesterday. I always thought I’d be dead by now. I’ve believed this for about as long as I can remember believing anything. It’s not that I especially wanted to die (though there are times I think I would have preferred it) or that I was going to take my life in my own hands and say goodbye to life (despite my many severe depressions, suicide has never held any grip on me, though I do find suicide rather fascinating as a subject, which maybe I’ll write about someday, but probably not—some things don’t really need to be discussed, yeah?), but that I always just believed I would be dead already.

For most of my life, I thought I’d die by the time I was thirty. Imagine my surprise when I didn’t! But I also had this intense feeling that thirty-five was just an age I wouldn’t see. Even with all that’s changed in my life—including turning thirty—the belief that I’d be dead by now has never really left me. Even having a son now, I still feel death haunting me.

I don’t want to die. Really, I quite like life. Life has never been so pleasant as these last few years. But, here I am, still imagining my death. No, it’s something more than imagining. I feel it. In my bones. In my blood. I feel it like a second skin wrapped tightly around me.

When I turn thirty-five next year, I wonder if I’ll feel differently.

Probably I won’t. Probably I’ll still feel as if I should have died a long time ago. It won’t make every day feel like a blessing, that I’ve outrun my limit, that I’m living on borrowed time, on god’s credit.

It’ll feel like every other day. I’ll be alive instead of dead. And no one will notice how strange that is but me, who knows I should’ve died. A long time ago.

Death is a private moment. If I were a different version of me, I’d call it a sacred moment. But death is really the only thing in life we do alone. It takes tremendous courage to die. It takes no courage at all.

It cannot be helped. Yet we must face it. Whether we face it bravely or cowering in cowardice, we face it still. And it is courageous to die, even if there’s nothing to be done about it.

Norm MacDonald chose to die quietly, without the world watching, without even his famous friends knowing. Why he did this is unknowable to anyone he didn’t tell. Maybe even to them.

I’ve always liked Norm MacDonald. I don’t have a strong memory of discovering him because he’s always been in the constellations of my world as a comedian. I think I saw him first while watching reruns of SNL on Comedy Central. During the day in the 90s and early 2000s, they’d just fill their timeslots with old SNL episodes and I watched them all repeatedly for reasons that have nothing to do with being a comedy fan and everything to do with being a child growing up in the glow of TV screens.

But I’ve always found him hilarious. I’d like to say I was a comedy connoisseur, that my favorite Norm MacDonald joke was one people don’t talk so much about. But the truth is much simpler. I just thought everything he did was funny. I laugh sometimes just seeing his stupid grin in these clips of him from talk shows that I never watched.

Other people have already spoken of his comedic genius and all that. Conan O’Brien did a whole hour about it. Probably lots of other comedians have too. I’m not equipped to talk about why some comedians are better than others, because I don’t understand comedy. I feel it. Feel it like the death in my bones and blood.

Despite my obsession with politics and cultural tensions, I won’t even talk about how his style of comedy very much fell out of fashion in the last few years, but he persisted in it, even as it killed the final gasps of his final real shot at fame. He loved to put his finger in a cultural wound and dig around. Maybe this was a clumsiness on his part or the product of a man ageing past relevance while the world changed without him, but I didn’t really see it that way. I don’t think anything he did, with regard to jokes, was accidental. Whether that damns or saves him depends on the aesthetics of your politics, probably, but I also think it’s accurate. He chose to do what he did, even when it burned his career.

And maybe it' really just comes down to the fact that I liked him. Thought he was funny, whether he punched up or down.

I’ve always found celebrity death uncomfortable. Not because I have any special attachment to whatever celebrity died today, but because of the grasping preening behavior it elicits in people when they’re at their keyboards logged into some mass communication program.

The way people take ownership of someone else’s death disgusts me. Honestly. I’d try to say it less harshly but I can’t.

I am revolted by your attempts to make someone’s death about you.

I’ve never spoken about this, but it’s one of the real reasons I had to get off social media. I literally cannot stand seeing people write odes to dead celebrities or contextualizing the life of the dead within their own life.

You sicken me. Honestly.

I hate you for it.

Norm MacDonald’s death wasn’t yours. It wasn’t for you. It had nothing to do with you. I’m sure his jokes meant a lot to you. They meant a lot to me, too. Maybe you had your first date with your current spouse at one of his standup shows. Maybe you spoke to him one time in Ottawa twenty years ago and that made you decide to finally take the plunge and become a barista in West Hollywood.

Norm MacDonald died. He didn’t die for you or for me.

He didn’t even tell his famous friends.

Death is a private thing. A quiet thing. A powerful thing.

It means everything to us who must live past the dead, and yet it doesn’t belong to us.

I think that tension—the powerless need—causes us to contextualize someone’s death within our own life. It’s probably the most normal thing people do. It happens every day with everyone who dies.

We tell their stories. We bring them back to life by revisiting the moments in life they shared with us. We hold them closer because we know that we’ll never hold them again. We breathe life into their dead lungs hoping to feel once more that joy and love.

But we didn’t know Norm MacDonald. Some of us didn’t even think he was funny. Some of us cheered when his most recent return to relevance crashed and burned. Some of us attempted to cancel him specifically because of the comedy he publicly performed. Some of us just thought he was corny or boring.

But whatever he was, his work belonged to us. It was a gift. He threw it out into the world for us to ignore or enjoy. The public life of a celebrity—even one as minor as Norm MacDonald—is a gift to the audience. And, with social media, that audience is now bigger and more vocal than ever previously possible.

But for all that Norm MacDonald gave us, consider what he did not give us.

He never told us who he was. Even in his many, many public interviews, he was reluctant to reveal himself. Even on stage, where he often spent 300 or more nights per year, he never told us who he was. He didn’t share who he was when the audience wasn’t there.

And, finally, he did not share his dying with us. Didn’t prepare us for his death.

Even his famous friends didn’t know he was dying.

And I think this is a very interesting point. I think there’s good reason to believe he would have stopped being famous decades ago, falling into complete obscurity, had he not continually appeared on Letterman and Conan. His famous friends, in many ways, kept his fame alive. A smoldering fire that occasionally sparked brightly into public consciousness before guttering and left as just a slight glowing ember.

He kept his death from these people, his avenue to fame and the public.

Like I said, I don’t think there’s a point in attempting to psychoanalyze a stranger, especially one who so defiantly kept his privacy, but I do find this significant.

His death wasn’t for us.

His life was. He gave us so many years of his life. So many millions of words given to us over however many media appearances, TV shows, movies, standup sets, and podcasts.

Is that not enough?

Or must we feast like vultures on his final act of privacy?