Final scene …

… How to Write John Updike's Deathbed - The Awl. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I’m not a great researcher. I tried to keep the death scene as clean and simple and spare as I could. I thought that less would be more. I thought that if I put in a few details that I could corroborate that that would do a lot more than trying to guess or pad or inject emotion by saying what people were feeling. Or getting them to tell me what people were feeling. I thought if I could get where they were in relation to the soon-corpse, and where they were standing and what hand gestures they made, it would say more than I was devastated by the sight of his emaciated body.