Of course, health be damned, Morrissey doesn’t care what his doctors think — he’s already announced plans for a tour through Mexico and South America in June and July.

In all likelihood, good ‘ol Moz will be just fine anyway. But what if he isn’t? Who, then, will take his place as the whiniest, most sexually ambiguous vegetarian in popular music? I’m partial to thinking that no one can, but whether his health deteriorates now or later, it will happen eventually, so we’d better get prepared to mourn the most mournful singer of our time.

Fortunately for us, Morrissey is obsessed with death; in fact, he pronounced his own demise in a January 31 note posted to official fan site True to You.

“The reports of my death have been greatly understated,” he wrote. “…I am fully determined to resume the tour on February 9 at the Chelsea Ballroom in Las Vegas. If there’s an audience of any kind in attendance, I just might die with a smile on my face, after all. If I am not there, I shall probably never again be anywhere.”

All this morbid posturing made me think: Morrissey could easily pen his own death scene using lines and themes from his own songs. So, without further ado, I bring you “The Death of Morrissey by Morrissey,” a very short story in three parts:

There Is a Light That Never Goes Out

Steven Patrick Morrissey thought it would be a good night to go out on the town. Stuck in a Royal Oak, Michigan hospital with a bleeding ulcer, a concussion and a disorder called Barrett’s esophagus, the singer was itching to escape. He couldn’t stand being surrounded by the stench of death any longer, so he dialed a number on his cell phone.

 “Take me out tonight,” he whispered into the phone. “I want to see people and I want to see life.”

Twenty minutes later, a nurse went to check on Morrissey after noticing the light was still on in his room, but the sick pop star was already gone.

First of the Gang to Die

As the dawn rises, there’s panic on the streets of Royal Oak when a group of petty thieves discover Morrissey’s body, crumpled in the back of a limousine crashed in a ditch near the edge of town. His bones are smashed against the door and the sunlight thrown across his face, with the driver nowhere to be found.

The thieves now stand under a nearby iron bridge. The neighbors gather around the scene, too, but they would rather not get involved. They didn’t know Morrissey or the Smiths, but they feel as if they’ve smelled the last 10 seconds of life.

Elsewhere, with his former bandmates still alive, the headlines read, “First of the Gang to Die.”

Cemetary Gates

The body will be taken back to dear old Blighty to be buried in Manchester on a dry, sunny day. As the funeral procession makes its way past Morrissey’s favorite pub and the local church, his loved ones will talk about how he made their lives precious — how he stole so many hearts away.

And everyone will say how he was too young to die; yet Morrissey requested his tombstone read “Life is very long when you’re lonely.”