After all, if Jesus had lived to a ripe old age, would he have been worth a passing glance two full millennia after his (most unfortunate/fortuitous) demise? If Elvis hadn't imploded in a haze of prescription painkillers, shag carpeting, shotguns and poor fashion decisions, would The King still be one of the most mourned/worshipped musicians of all time?

Go ahead, pick an icon, any icon: Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Kur(d)t Cobain, Shannon Hoon, Sid Vicious, Jerry Garcia, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Yup, all deader than any number of doornails, but they live -- well, sort of -- with posthumous careers that keep on giving. Chances are, there's little to buy in the afterlife, but hey, the residuals keep on coming!

Is it any wonder that a member of the Dwarves staged his own death a few years ago? Hey, the press picked up on it, there were obituaries and everything, and the band got a whole bunch of ink out of it. Even when the whole bloody mess was revealed to be a hoax, the resulting retractions kept the group's name in the papers. Cynical? You betcha. In poor taste? No doubt. Brilliant in a highly twisted sort of way? Sure. Did the means justify the end? Probably not. So?

Someone or other once said that the only bad press is no press, and maybe there's some truth to that. Unless, of course, you're the one lying there with no pulse, you're the one with your brains blown out all over the carpet, you're the one with the needle stuck forever in your cold blue arm. Or, maybe worse -- no, definitely worse -- you're the kid who looks up to that rapidly cooling corpse as some kind of role model.

Which brings us to a guy named Bradley Nowell who died last week. He wasn't a household name, but he was doing more than all right. He was 28 years old and had just finished recording a new album with his band, Sublime, which had done pretty well with a single called "Date Rape." He had an 11-month-old son named Jakob and a brand new wife whom he married 10 days before he was found dead in a San Francisco hotel room. He was supposed to play a show that night, but, while the "cause of death is under investigation," it appears that Nowell, who'd been sober for two months, overdosed.

And another one bites the dust.

Blind Melon's Shannon Hoon was all of 27 when he showed up dead for a gig. I remember Chrissie Hynde most clearly at last year's Bridge Benefit; she was fabulous as usual, but when she dedicated her cover of "The Needle and the Damage Done" to the recently overdosed Hoon, it was a moment that transcended poignancy. "He should have been here," she said grimly. And yeah, he should have, but he had another engagement, at the coroner's office.

While Timothy Leary's death had everything to do with cancer and little to do with years of feckless drug ingestion, he managed to bring some grace to the process. Here was a man who knew what was coming -- at least, as little as any of us could know about that inevitable yawning morass -- but still posted lists of the impressive number of legal/illegal drugs that he gobbled down daily.

On the Web, Leary threw up snapshots of what life was like in his final days. It's something that Cobain, Garcia, Nowell, Hoon et al. never had a chance to do. Leary's little online haven didn't glorify death; there's little to worship in slowly rotting from cancer. But there's much to admire in a man who chose to meet his inevitable demise with a certain modicum of dignity.

It's a solemn trust to have complete strangers care what happens to you. Leary understood this; he's shown that dignity has nothing to do with blowing one's head off/sticking a spike in one's arm/leaving a family behind to forever wonder why. After all, if you wait long enough, death will come to you.

I guarantee it.