If the 1995 stroke that paralyzed Jean-Dominique Bauby was cruelly premature, at least death had the courtesy to wait until the 45-year-old French journalist finished his last assignment. Less than 72 hours after readers and critics alike hailed as a triumph his memoir of living with locked-in syndrome–a state of virtually total paralysis that leaves the victim, in Bauby’s words, “like a mind in a jar”–the former editor in chief of French Elle magazine died.
