While working on my Dead Pool 2005 list, I had a very morbid thought:
What would happen to this place if our Beloved Leader suddenly dropped dead?
It would be in mourning until the next coronation.
(Cecil is dead, long live Cecil)!
Isn’t it like Jonestown? Don’t we all have to die too?
I suspect he’s like Obi-Wan Kenobi. You know, if you strike him down, he only becomes more powerful. Or knowlegeable. Or something like that.
Cecil, like any other fictional character registered as a trademark, will only “die” when the Chicago Reader has no further use of “him”.
How many points is Cecil worth anyways?
How are you feeling, Unca Cecil? 
But before we do, we have to refute the urban legend that it was Kool-Aid we put the poison in.
When my cat died I wrapped him in newspaper. Somehow that seems fitting for Unca Cecil as well.
The Dread Pirate Adams will never die!
But do we bury him in the backyard or tell the younger more naive dopers that he is now running free and happy at some farm in the country?
I see dead Cecils.
I hope he’s not found in an embarrassing position like Elvis was. That would set the Fight Against Ignorance back quite a few years.
(a tip of the hat to Francis P. Church and the New York Sun)
Yes, Shirley, there is a Cecil. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to our life its highest beauty and joy.
Not believe in Cecil! You might as well not believe in faries! You might get your papa to hire men to watch the front door of the Chicago Reader to catch Santa (excuse me that should read, “Cecil”), but even if they did not see Cecil coming out of the door, what would that prove? Nobody sees Cecil, but that is no sign that there is no Cecil. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor adults can see. Did you ever see faries dancing on the lawn? Of course not. But that does not prove they are not there.
Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest men, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only fancy, poetry love, romance and the straight dope can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory behind. Is it all real?
Ah Shirley, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Cecil! Thank God! He lives and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Shirley, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the hearts of doperdom.
(Sorry, I keep getting caught up in the season)
He’s practically a newbie by post count and hasn’t posted for 4 months. Who cares. He may have died in September for all we know.
Happy New Year oh enlightened one!!!
Old Cecil’s don’t die, they just fade away.
That, or some mysterious disappearance with no clues, like Amelia Earheart. One that would lead to endless speculation on the SDMB and decades of Staff Reports.
Cecil, and I thought this was common knowledge, was touched by the hand of God - or the horn of the IPU (depending on which version of the story you believe). Either way, Cecil has been granted immortality and it is the kind of immortality that doesn’t require feeding off of the blood of others.
OMG I feel like a kid who just found out about Santa from his older brother. Damn, that’s pretty sad.
If Cecil ever died, the Chicago Reader would probably do something stupid like let go of Ed Zotti and hire a new editor who would ghost write under the ‘pen name’ of Cecil Adams, thus hiding the fact that there is no such person as a Cecil Adams.
Anymore.
Peace.
There are those who say this has already happened.