On a Tuesday in July, we received word of three deaths, a docudrama about a buried city, and a flower parade. The deaths belonged to a beauty queen, a chef, and a heavy metal drummer; the docudrama is narrated by a man who plays a trickster god; the parade is in Medellín, where 14,000 free passes are now available by chatbot 4. This is not a miscellany. It is a pattern, if you know how to look.
Consider the deaths. LaToya Malcolm, 35, a former Miss Universe Jamaica contestant 1; Paco Ron, 68, the chef who earned the first Michelin star in western Asturias and co-founded the Nueva Cocina Asturiana movement 3; Claudio “Pato” Strunz, 59, the drummer for Argentine heavy metal bands Hermética and Malón 6. Three different professions, three different countries, three different ways of being remembered. The beauty queen leaves behind a pageant organization’s social media announcement; the chef leaves behind a cuisine; the drummer leaves behind a sound that outlasts the body. None of these are the same thing, but all of them are the same question: what survives?
The answer, I suspect, is not what we think. Tom Hiddleston, narrating a docudrama about Pompeii, uses a storytelling technique borrowed from his Marvel character Loki—a hand gesture that manipulates time 8. The irony is almost too perfect: a fictional god of mischief teaching us how to think about a real catastrophe. Pompeii was buried in ash, preserved, and then excavated; the people who died there are now museum exhibits, their last moments frozen. The docudrama is called Pompeya: Más allá del tiempo—beyond time. But what does that mean, exactly? It means that the dead are not gone; they are merely waiting for the right storyteller.
This is where the pattern tightens. The deaths we mourn today are not random; they are curated by the living. LaToya Malcolm’s cause of death has not been disclosed 1; Claudio Strunz’s cause is rumored but unconfirmed ; Magdalena, the wife of Spanish entertainer Juan “El Golosina,” died at 94 after stomach issues, and her husband found her unresponsive . We do not know how they died, only that they died, and that someone decided to tell us. The selection is itself a form of judgment: these are the deaths that matter, these are the lives that will be remembered, at least until tomorrow’s news cycle.