The three Limbourg brothers created the most beautiful book of hours in the world, Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, but all three brothers died of the plague in the same year as their patron the Duc de Berry, in the early years of the 15th Century, not having completely finished the book. The brothers were probably in their thirties at the time, which is pretty young to die.

It’s been a week for finding out how artists die.

I just finished a book of light pieces by Maeve Brennan, who wrote as the “Long Winded Lady” for “Talk of the Town” in The New Yorker. After I finished the book, I looked her up, and shouldn’t have. She was briefly married to St. Clair McElway, another New Yorker writer, who was alcoholic, mentally ill, and difficult. Most of The New Yorker writers drank too much and had problems, now that I think of it (I have read too many books about New Yorker writers and editors, I’m afraid). Anyway, Brennan died at 60 in a nursing home, indigent, alcoholic herself, and anonymous.

You start thinking that artists have to have awful things happen to them. Look at Dylan Thomas. Or don’t look at him. Look away. Terrible alcoholic. Died unpleasantly.

The photographer Diane Arbus was one of the greats, but she had an incestuous relationship with her brother the poet Howard Nemerov, and later committed suicide. And Lord Byron, who was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” went off to fight in a silly war, caught a cold, and died of the side effects at the age of 36. (He had a relationship with his half sister too, I seem to remember. Hmmmm.) Robert Frost was a depressed mess and everybody in his family died on him, though he lived a long time. And then of course there was Keats, until suddenly there wasn’t. Never mind Gene Hackman, one of my favorite actors.

But then I remember that everyone dies, even non-artists and non-poets, and a lot of us who aren’t great artists have some pretty terrible setbacks. Madness, drunkenness, accidents, disease, bereavement, and catastrophic failure are downright predictable, in fact.

It is fashionable to believe that if one only follows the correct diet, exercises appropriately, and takes the currently fashionable elixirs, one will live to a ripe old age and leave a beautiful corpse. Unfortunately, bad things eventually happen to both bad people and good people, too, without partiality or attention to morality or diligence.

For instance, my largely blameless mother, who exercised diligently and took good care of herself, got Parkinson’s Disease. She starved herself to death at the end, while she still could control how she ate. Pretty artistic, if you ask me.

I had a pretty rocky start myself, and you would think I would have emulated the Limbourg brothers and die at an early age like a sensible person, but no, despite my early promise as an alcoholic and all-around wastrel, I ruined my trajectory by quitting drinking in my early twenties and have been remarkably sedate and relatively healthy since then. I’m old now, and it’s getting late to become a great artist, especially since I’m not particularly interested in being a great artist.

It’s not too late to have a spectacular and disgraceful death, though.

On the other hand, it would be fun to subvert the expectations of my family and die quietly in my sleep in my 90s.

I’m not being morbid, not exactly. It’s just that one sort of wants to know. And not know, at the same time.