Noelle McCarthy: Life (and death) in the media spotlight

Opinion

I'm not sure why I'm so sad about the passing of Nicholas Hughes this week. God knows, there's been enough of it about in the last few days, death that is. It certainly feels like it, wading through the tracts of eulogising and outpourings of public grief that have attended the passing of Natasha Richardson and Jade Goody.

Quite why the demise of a stage actress and a reality TV star have occasioned so many column inches in the British press is the most boring sort of media mystery.

Probably it comes down to credentials - the impeccable dynastic ones of the former and the lack of any at all in the case of the latter. Both of these women were high profile enough that their deaths warranted extensive coverage, and as I looked at them pictured, side by side on website after website, I had to laugh. I don't know if they ever met, if they ever spoke, but I sincerely doubt it.

The mind boggles at what the golden-haired scion of the great acting family of Richardsons would have said to the functional illiterate who got kicked off Celebrity Big Brother for being racist. Both these women were British, and that's all they had in common.

I suppose you could say both were entertainers, but winning Big Brother and playing in the The Cherry Orchard require very different sets of attributes. Jade Goody and Natasha Richardson were worlds apart, and yet there they were, on the internet, all over MSN and Jezebel. One blonde, one bald, both smiling, frozen together side by side in death, as they never, ever were in life.

Death is cruel like that. You can't choose when, or how you go, and you certainly don't get a say in the other deaths that surround yours. I remember castigating the late Hone Tuwhare in a column last year for slipping off this mortal coil at the same time as Sir Edmund Hillary.

Poet of the people he may have been, but who wouldn't be overshadowed by the passing of Sir Ed? That's what makes me feel sad, and awkward about Nicholas Hughes. It's impossible to read about his death without being reminded of another. What reason have I to mourn the death of a marine biologist who lived in Alaska and devoted himself to academia until he took his own life last week? None whatsoever, but for the fact that Nicholas Hughes is the son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. The doomed marriage of these two is more famous now than anything either ever wrote, and the saddest consequence of that is the subsequent trivialisation of their work. By focusing on their marriage and its tragic end, generations of stupid, rabid lesbians almost succeeded in turning some of the finest poetry in the English language into a cartoonish battle of the sexes.

Hughes was demonised as a selfish womaniser, while Plath was given the role of the betrayed, neglected and ultimately suicidal young wife. She was a mother, too, of course. Every first-year Women's Studies student knows how carefully Sylvia blocked up the doors with towels, and how she left out bread and milk for her children before she put her head in the oven.

In easy contrast with Hughes' mistress Assia Wevill, who took their young daughter with her when she gassed herself a few years later, Plath's is one of the most famous literary hagiographies, and her suicide was still being fetishised by a certain class of dopey undergrad when I was at uni.

The presence of her children in the next room have lent her death scene much power over the years. Later on Hughes would immortalise his son and daughter in the volcanic Birthday Letters, a series of poems addressed to his dead wife.

Of all of the deeply sad images in these poems, and there are so many, the most heartbreaking is the vision of a baby Nicholas in the days after his mother's death: "As I fed him in his high white chair. Great hands of grief were wringing and wringing His wet cloth of a face. They wrung out his tears."

It is impossible to separate Nicholas Hughes from the legacy of his parents, his mother especially, given the manner of his death. But the obituaries written by his friends don't really say much about how he felt being the son of two great and tragic poets. Rather, they talk about his love of fishing, and his passion for his research. Of his life in Alaska, far away from the life his parents made in Yorkshire and London.

Our deaths never belong to us, as Jade Goody and Natasha Richardson have shown. Nicholas Hughes' death might belong to his mother, but it is nice to think his life was entirely his own.