McIlroy said he reached his lowest point last July around British Open time at Muirfield where he missed the cut and revealed he felt "brain dead" out on the course.
He wasn't even on the vessel an hour and he was dead, rubbed out by a Mafia hitman who sawed off his legs, stuffed his body into a 55-gallon oil drum, and threw the barrel overboard into Dumfoundling Bay.
Is he dead too, arisen out of the lake which is full of the corpses of beasts?
A moment later he's dead, carried out on the others' shoulders.
"Seeing him when he was dead, laid out in hospital, wasn't as bad as when I saw him a few weeks before, when he was a man in anguish and torment.
Honoring and caring for the dead, he points out, is considered a mitzvah, or a blessed act, in Judaism because it does not involve any tangible compensation.
As he cleaned out dead leaves in his two-tiered pond in Monmouth Junction on a recent Sunday afternoon, he took an informal head count of the platinum and orange fish darting in and out of the rock shelves.
Marc's reaction to his wife's reappearance – "'I thought you were dead,' he blurted out" – is up there with Lisbeth Salander's to being raped – "'Shit', she thought when he ripped off her T-shirt" – in the pantheon of Eurothriller banality.
Similarly, for the Cenotaph in Whitehall, Lutyens managed, impressively, to resist widespread calls for Christian imagery – what about the Jewish, Hindu or Muslim dead, he pointed out – and for any obvious representational sculpture – the lamenting angels and the like previously used in the genre.
"My insurer would like to see me dead," he taps out on his black laptop.
