Death
On May 28, 1975, Emerson's body was found next to his bicycle, near the West Side Highway, in Manhattan. Emerson's death is listed officially as a hit and run. He was 30 years old. To date, no one has been arrested or charged in connection with his death. Following a weekend-long wake hosted by Max's Kansas City owner Mickey Ruskin, Emerson was buried in Wharton, New Jersey.
After Emerson's death, various reports surfaced that he was not killed in a hit and run accident, but overdosed on heroin in a different location, and was dumped as staged hit and run. These reports have never been substantiated, and Emerson's official cause of death has never been changed.
In the book Making Tracks, Debbie Harry provided an account of the circumstances surrounding Emerson's death:
One night we were over at Eric's apartment working on a tape of "Heart of Glass" on his Teac fourtrack tape recorder, when he suddenly staggered out of the kitchen looking ashen. He looked even more distraught and sad when we left. Being satisfied drove him crazy in the end, because he had everything so he didn't care about anything anymore. He used to go out jogging every day, and did feats of physical endurance like strapping twenty-pound weights to each ankle and then bicycling up to the Factory. The next day we were sitting around the house just after we woke up when Barbara called with the bad news. "Oh, Eric got hit by a truck." He had been a good friend and inspiration to so many people. We didn't quite understand what had happened, but we went up to a party/wake held for him and saw a lot of people from the earlier glitter days. Eric's death definitely marked an end to the glitter period. We still miss him.
Read more about this topic: Eric Emerson
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or “broken heart,” is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.”
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.... Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)