I found this obit for Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath's son Nicholas Hughes, 47, who hanged himself last week in Alaska, where he worked as a fisheries biologist, offensive. It subordinated Hughes's life to a recitation of the famous tragedy of his mother's life, which ended in 1963, at 30, by her own hand–"by sticking her head in an oven," the Times says baldly–after her husband left her for another woman, Assia Wevill, who six years later also killed herself.
It felt like this was the only reason the Times did the obit, to recount that melodrama. We got a few paragraphs of the Nicholas Hughes story then this assumptive transition–
And it was off to the literary races. The Plath-Hughes story is desperately sad, and we know it, we know very little at all about Nicholas Hughes's life. Three obligatory paragraphs stuck on at the end of the moral tale. It seemed insulting to a troubled man's life.
