...a man can die but once; we owe God a death.{Shakespeare,William: HenryIV, Part 2, Act III, Scene i}

Mailer has joined Hemingway, debt paid in full.

Both meet in the sea of souls, where no men are old and all are equal.

Lions still roar on this shore.

Men still come home to children like Hemingway's daughter, who in a letter to him called Old Man and the Sea "adolescent."

Mothers like Hemingway's and mine and perhaps yours still try and fail to make sons into little girls.

Sons still rage at their writer father's "shrill, strange, exaggerated, overheated style."

Writers still come home to wives who in published writings imagine:

...happily scooping out those baby blues like spoonfuls of cantaloupe, slowly slitting his fat, bourbon-soaked liver'' -- or, better yet, ''chopping off his hands, dooming him to write the great American novel with his feet.''

Those two, though, their art is great and work finished at last, joy lived, pain gone.