The Wildest Rumpus: Maurice Sendak and the Art of Death
This piece by Katie Riophe on Maurice Sendak is haunting:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/maurice-sendak-art-of-death/472350/
Even as a tiny child in Brooklyn, Maurice was unusually alert to the prospect of dying. He was floored by every childhood sickness-measles, scarlet fever, double pneumonia. “My parents were not discreet,” he said. “They always thought I was going to die.” He laid out the toy soldiers on the blankets of his sickbed. He watched other children play through the window.
One day his grandmother, who had emigrated from the shtetls outside Warsaw, dressed him in a white suit, white shirt, white tights, white shoes, and took him out to the stoop to sit with her. The idea was that the angel of death would pass over them and think that he was already an angel and there was no need to snatch him from his family.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/maurice-sendak-art-of-death/472350/
Even as a tiny child in Brooklyn, Maurice was unusually alert to the prospect of dying. He was floored by every childhood sickness-measles, scarlet fever, double pneumonia. “My parents were not discreet,” he said. “They always thought I was going to die.” He laid out the toy soldiers on the blankets of his sickbed. He watched other children play through the window.
One day his grandmother, who had emigrated from the shtetls outside Warsaw, dressed him in a white suit, white shirt, white tights, white shoes, and took him out to the stoop to sit with her. The idea was that the angel of death would pass over them and think that he was already an angel and there was no need to snatch him from his family.