In the end, Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz's departure was an eerie case of life seeming to imitate art. Schulz died last Saturday on the eve of the final appearance of his Sunday strip. (Like the last original daily strip, which ran in newspapers in January, it featured a farewell message from Schulz, who had been diagnosed with cancer in November). The coincidence was so striking that many people confessed to a sense of its having been scripted -- as if by the hand of some giant, unseen, cosmic cartoonist of uncertain benevolence.

Life, of course, doesn't work that way, and neither does death. Schulz's death, though early, was not unexpected, and the fact that it came just hours before Snoopy typed that last affecting message from atop his doghouse was fitting, but hardly surprising. Charlie Brown and the gang would also be the first to agree that there is little point trying to fathom the significance of such coincidences, especially not in a quest for consolation. One of the things we learned from them over the years was that there is, in this world, much sadness and little comfort and we might as well get used to it.

The death did, however, prompt a second wave of public grief and praise -- the first having come last December, when Schulz announced he could no longer continue the phenomenally successful comic strip he had drawn day in and day out for nearly half a century. On both occasions, Americans naturally mourned the loss of a national icon. For many, there had not been a day in their lives when the round-headed kid philosophers had not appeared in the daily newspaper.