Death
On September 8, 1995, Chang was found dead in her apartment on Rochester Avenue in Westwood, Los Angeles by her landlord. That she was found days after her death testifies to her seclusion. Her death certificate states that she died from cardiovascular disease. According to Chang's will, she was cremated without any memorial services and her ashes were released into the Pacific Ocean.
She willed all her possessions to Stephen Soong (宋淇) and his wife Mae Fong Soong (鄺文美) in Hong Kong, but they later died. Their daughter Elaine and son Roland inherited the estate of Chang's works. Roland, who writes the influential EastSouthWestNorth blog in Hong Kong, has spoken about her works.
Chang's brother, Zijing, died in 1997. Neither he nor his sister had any children, and the family has no descendants.
Read more about this topic: Eileen Chang
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“‘Tis no extravagant arithmetic to say, that for every ten jokes,—thou hast got an hundred enemies; and till thou hast gone on, and raised a swarm of wasps about thine ears, and art half stung to death by them, thou wilt never be convinced it is so.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“When Gabriel’s trumpet ends all life’s delay,
Will crash the beams of firmamental woe:
Not nature will sustain the even crime
Of death, though death sustains all nature, so.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)