Mother. Umm...grandmother. And...and...collector of stuffed Christopher Hitchens dolls. And - look, she was a good mother and grandmother - isn't that enough? Born: September 7, 1980, in Capandgown Town, South Africa. Died: September 6, 2077, in Illiqvatnivuk, Antarctica, of a cerebral hemorrhage of the left ankle, age 97.
The thing that most people remember about Cedrina Chante was her sense of humour. "Oh, yeah, Grammie Chante had a great sense of humour," said Albertina Chante-Song, Cedrina's granddaughter. "I...I can't remember any of the jokes she told, or even laughing all that much when I was around her, but, damn, she could be hysterical!"
What the most people of the previous paragraph are still coming to terms with is Cedrina's surprising legacy: a 60,000 page suicide note.
Cedrina started writing the note as a 19 year-old student of Keith Kelly and his Kool Kolleagues at Kelowna Kollege. In the beginning, the note contained typical teenage angst about not being able to fit in at Kollege, wondering if her parents had ever loved her and a bad break-up with high school sweetheart Stoat Gobberfield. The expected musings about throwing herself off a bridge, in front of a bus or at a penguin inhaler gave no indication of the keen insights into the human condition that marked much of the rest of her writing.
"She had a wicked sense of humour," said lifelong friend Antonia Zoobisiastes. "I remember, she once said - no, wait, that was Jerry Seinfeld. Okay, but there was this other time when - no, that was Eddie Murphy. Umm...Groucho Marx...Woody Allen...the Goodies...god, thinking about her brings back such memories of laughter!"
At the age of 22, Cedrina Quibbleforth quit school to marry Eldritch Chante; over the next 12 years, they would have seven children. Although she contributed very little to the suicide note during these years, Cedrina's attitudes towards life and death can be seen to mature with additional elements of financial pressure, post-partum depression and an inability to find anything on TV worth watching.
"Oh, yeah, this is where Chante's vision really expands," stated literary wine steward Oleander Ruttlesedge. "Spending most of the decade in the hospital or caring for babies while recovering at home gave her time to brood more deeply, and find more creative ways of killing herself, many revolving around soiled diapers. I especially like the pages where she begs her husband to bring her some cigarettes so she can smoke near an Oxygen tank. Priceless! I never knew her personally, but I imagine Chante had a brilliant sense of humour!"
From her 30s until well into her 70s Cedrina entered her most fertile period (as a writer), with ruminations on life, death and the futility of dental hygiene that are sure to launch a thousand undergraduate theses. At the same time, her dreams of suicide, while becoming more creative, became less and less attainable: developing a time machine so that she can go back in time and be chased by a velociraptor, from whom she escapes (I know, I know - but it took me over 20 minutes to get this phrase right, so let it go), only to be eaten in two bites by a t-rex is one of the more credible ones.
Cedrina's last decades were marked by a decline in her ability to express herself. The final few hundred pages of the suicide note are little more than the words, "Die! Die! Die! Die!" repeated over and over again.
"Yeah, Miss Cedrina, she were alright, wernit?" said Brodie Goodfellow, who tended Chante at the Kieff Richards Home for Wayward Elderly Reliving Their Youth in her declining years. "She mostly kept herself to herself, yeah? Scribblin' in them notebooks of hers. She only got into two knife fights in her time wif us and - be fair - bitches had it comin'. Yeah. She had a right wonnerful sense o' humour because, well, that's what yer supposed ta say when people die, innit?"
Random House has announced that it has bought the rights to publish the suicide note, which it will be releasing in 87 volumes over the next four decades exclusively for the Ken Doll e-reader. "You couldn't publish it in print," allowed Vice President of Acquisitions and Extemporizations Jack Sworthy. "You'd need a small warehouse just to keep all of it in! And, when I say that, I mean: we felt the dire immediacy of the prose deserved a medium which could deliver it to readers immediately. And, direly."
One must ask - okay, that's a journalistic cheat. Really, I must ask: why spend almost 80 years writing a suicide note if you don't actually kill yourself? "We can only speculate," Ruttlesedge speculated. "I suspect she really did intend to kill herself, but something always came up. You know how life can be. Some of my colleagues have suggested that she wrote it as an elaborate joke on the literary community. If so, it shows an astonishing sense of humour!"
Frederica von McToast-Hyphen
Frederica von McToast-Hyphen is the Alternate Reality News Service's People Writer.