Life & Mortality Quote by Richard McKenna

Death, in McKenna's line, isn’t a mystery or a tragedy so much as an administrative problem. "You can't just plain die" opens with the common-sense bluntness of someone who’s seen enough bodies to know that the real trouble starts after the last breath: paperwork, protocol, chain of command, the brittle comfort of procedure. The punch is in the second sentence. "You got to do it by the book" turns the most private human act into a compliance issue, as if mortality itself needs authorization.

McKenna, a mid-century American writer with deep proximity to military life, understands how institutions metabolize catastrophe. Armies and bureaucracies survive by standardizing the unstandardizable: grief becomes reportable, the unspeakable gets a form number, and even error can be made legible if it happens in the approved way. The humor is dark but not ornamental. It exposes a coping mechanism: if you can treat death as something that must follow procedure, you can pretend it’s controllable, containable, almost fair.

Subtextually, the line indicts a culture that prizes systems over people. It’s not just that rules persist in the face of tragedy; it’s that rules can become the only language left. Saying you have to die "by the book" hints at how institutions defend themselves from moral responsibility: when the book is followed, no one is to blame. The cruelty is accidental and routine - which is precisely why it lands.