John Williams inspects the literary themes of love and death, and, in the same article, suggests a few reads as we enter the presidential primaries:

Even readers less snarky than Wilde can be forgiven if fictional expirations meet with less than solemn reactions. As Tolstoy wrote in “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” “The very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heard about it, as always, a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn’t.”