Don't Cry for Morrissey's Cancer, He'll Never Really Die

“To make true friends can take a lifetime, and at the same time, the more you know a person, the more they disappoint you.” That's Morrissey speaking to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo ahead of his dates there this week, but he might as well have also been speaking about himself. It's an emotion that fans of the irascible, often confounding, and perpetually truant singer have gotten used to. Disappointment was never just a side effect of our relationship with Morrissey, it's always been the primary condition. The more we're disappointed, the closer we get, you might say.

That's taken on a sharper context in recent years, as his string of tour cancellations have increased due to a series of professed illnesses, including his most recent tour behind this year's World Peace Is None of My Business (which I thankfully still managed to see). The disappointment among the woefully devoted, like myself, has turned on occasion into anger at his seeming indifference and unprofessionalism. But this week, the erstwhile The Smiths frontman has managed to turn even that on its head with the surprising revelation that he's been undergoing treatment for cancer this entire time.

“They have scraped cancerous tissues from me four times already,” he said. “But who cares. If I die, then I die. And if not, then I don’t.”

And just like that, he's gotten one over on us again. It's a quintessentially Mozzian bit of emotional judo. Yes, I've been somewhat unavailable, but you see, I've been going about the business of dying. Surely you'll forgive me.

Perhaps it's not time to sing him to sleep just yet. At the moment, he says, he's doing fine. “I'm not going to worry about that, I’ll rest when I'm dead.” It's probably worth pointing out, however, that late last year, he was admitted to the hospital with, among other things, Barrett's oesophagus, a condition that can lead to a particularly bad form of throat cancer.

Fans have, as you might imagine, not taken to the news very well all the same, only partly because it may mean we're really, really, really never going to get a The Smiths reunion now. The prospect of the death of a beloved artist or celebrity is never exactly cause for celebration (although there are probably plenty around the world who'll crack a smile when the old bastard kicks off). But in truth, being confronted with the mortality of my favorite singer has sort of paralyzed me emotionally. I'd have expected a serious and gruesome balancing of the emotional ledger to result. Of course I've always known he'll die someday, as will we all, but the actual prospect of it here writ large has instead driven me into a sort of childish revelry about the romance of the greatest crime of them all. Maybe that's not surprising, as the allure of the grave is a theme well-trod for we woebegone lot. And more to the point, Morrissey, perhaps more than any other artist of his stature, has been prepping us for his death since the day we first heard him. That dalliance on the border is in fact the very appeal. Morrissey without the circuitous dance with death is just a sad, unloveable loner. Where's the drama in that?

“I'm at an age when one should no longer be making music,” he says in the interview. Perhaps, but even his more recent material has remained engaging long after many others have reached their expiration date. “Many composers of classical music died at age 34. And I'm still here, and nobody knows what to do with me,” he goes on.

So too did many of the literary figures, from Blake to Shelley, in whom the origins of Morrissey's sickly romanticism can be found. “Fun is an artificial construct, and if you don’t have a sex life (and I have none at all) it is impossible to deal with people, because people only talk about sex,” he reminds us. Sex is the most obvious means we have, both physically, and metaphorically, of denying death. What does it mean then to deny the denial?

His, and by extension, our, obsession with mortality won't come as a surprise to anyone, but it's illustrative to revisit just how inextricably tied to the looming specter of the beyond his music has always been. The Smiths’ first self-titled album is itself haunted with enough ghosts to populate a cemetery, from “Pretty Girls Make Graves,” “Reel Around the Fountain,” “Still Ill” to “Suffer Little Children.” It would probably be easier to compile a list of The Smiths and Morrissey songs over the decades that didn't take death as their primary subject, or, at the very least, in which it was a viscerally felt, impending presence from "First of the Gang to Die," "The Bullfighter Dies," "You Have Killed Me," "The Father Who Must Be Killed," to "There's a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends," to name but a few. ​“I Know It's Over” from The Queen Is Dead, is the one that I haven't been able to get out of my mind all morning:

“Oh mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head.”

“Cemetry Gates” is probably more indicative of the way we're supposed to process Morrissey's eventual death, even if this latest revelation doesn't prove to be his final bow:

“So we go inside and we gravely read the stones, all those people all those lives where are they now? With the loves and hates, and passions just like mine, they were born and then they lived and then they died.”

It's hard not to hear an echo of that line in the singer's stiff upper-lipped announcement of his ill health. But one can't help but wonder if death, the provence of Keats, and Yeats, and weird lover Wilde, and the endless string of doomed, tragic film and literary stars he's obsessed over in song, isn't where Morrissey belongs. No, not Steven Patrick Morrissey the human man, of course, but Morrissey the idea, the one that we actually know, the one that's important to us. He's made his dissatisfaction with this mortal coil quite clearly known.

“Live with a lowness that no one else knows,” he sang on this year's “Earth Is the Loneliest Planet.” “Time after time you say 'next time, next time,’ But you fail as a woman and you lose as a man. We do what we can. And earth is the cruelest place you will never understand.”

I write this in the midst of some of a more personally pressing illnesses—yet another in a series of thrice threatened, and thrice overcome death bed imbroglios with an emotionally distant and long estranged father to name one. I can't help but note the overlap between the way I've processed that eventuality and how I'm considering this news. Morrissey has always been a sort of emotionally distant, unavailable, churlish, harrumphing father figure to many of us who number among his fans. But, like with my own father, every time I've seen him in recent years, I've always assumed it was going to be the last time. Each time it turns out not to be, it's emotionally draining.

It's probably much ado about nothing in the short term. Morrissey isn't actually dying, because in a way, he's been inhabiting the land of the dead all along, the land of dissatisfaction and isolation, and that's why, cancer or not, he'll live forever, long after the rest of us are gone, brooding from beyond the grave, disappointed in all of us, a favor we can only hope to someday return.

Luke O'Neil is on Twitter - @lukeoneil47