Then, in 1991, Foxx tried to make a comeback by starring in a new sitcom called The Royal Family, which had been pitched under the title Chest Pains. You can probably guess where this is going. Foxx was being interviewed on set by Entertainment Tonight, but a producer insisted that he come back to finish rehearsing a scene. Foxx fumed about the interruption and, like he did so many times on Sanford, promptly grabbed a chair and dramatically fell to the floor. It wasn't the first time he'd done that on set, so for a moment, everyone thought that he was trying to turn the tense situation into a joke. He wasn't. He even called for his wife, exactly as he had done dozens of times in his most acclaimed role.

They managed to get Foxx to the hospital, where the 68-year-old was pronounced dead four hours later. The producers were wracked with grief ... over the fate of the show, because Hollywood is a mill and humanity is their grist.

So it makes sense that even a Hall of Fame player like Pete Maravich feared playing professionally for a decade just to die of a heart attack at age 40. That's not speculation; that's literally what he said to a reporter in 1976, when he was 26. He had been in the league for four years and was getting some criticism for his showboating style, so he wanted to make it clear that he saw a life beyond the game.

Well, Maravich ended up playing in the NBA for exactly ten years. And then, when playing some pickup basketball at the age of 40, he collapsed and died from an undiagnosed heart condition right after saying, "I feel great." It was so sudden and so cosmically on the nose that the guys he was playing with initially thought he was joking around. He wasn't. Well, not unless he was super committed to the punchline.

Sports IllustratedWe’re beginning to get the idea that you should never simply assume someone is faking a heart attack.

That 1936 magazine bought Story a fun icebreaker for Hawaiian swim-up bars, if not much else. But little did either party know that George and Life were to be intertwined forever. Life's cancellation was announced in 2000, and George's own life was cancelled mere days later, on April 4th. Life's final issue, in May, featured a quote from his widow about how he enjoyed his fame as the Life baby. This would be the part in a hacky movie where a character declares, "It's almost as if he couldn't live ... without Life," shortly before you walk out of the theater and try to argue for a refund.

Kaganovich showed remarkable staying power, surviving both Stalin's routine associate purges as well as his purges of Jews in the government -- Kaganovich ended up being the only high-ranking Jewish official to survive through the end of Stalin's reign. When he wasn't helping to kill millions, he took care of all the details that Stalin found tedious, like industrial management and the construction of railways.

But Kaganovich fell out of favor when Stalin died, mostly because of the whole mass murder thing. He was sidelined, then eventually expelled from the Party entirely. But he managed to kick around as a quiet, reserved pensioner until the very end, remaining a hardline communist who hated all of Gorbachev's reforms. The Soviet Union eventually fell into decline, and the last of the Old Bolsheviks died in his armchair, aged 97, on July 26, 1991, months before his beloved Soviet Union also bit the dust.

Our suggested epitaph: "He was there at the beginning, he was there at the end, and he was an asshole all the while in between."

Despite never being considered a man of letters, Grant somehow managed to crank out his memoirs at the inhuman rate of roughly 50 pages a day. Also helpful was an unlikely ally in Grant's last battle: Mark Twain, who not only offered to publish the book with incredibly generous royalties, but also sent out an army of 10,000 subscription agents dressed in Union uniforms to sell copies across the country, which was the old-timey equivalent of the celebrity retweet.

Grant finished his memoir only days before he died, and it became a monumental bestseller. The book saved Grant's family from poverty and then some, earning $450,000 in a time when dinner out cost, like, a quarter. Twain called it a "literary masterpiece," critics compared him to Thoreau and Whitman, and even today, it's considered one of the greatest works of American writing ever. So if you're a struggling writer, remember that a first-timer in perpetual agony on his deathbed managed to crank out a more successful work than you could ever hope to produce. That probably doesn't help you, but in all fairness, we weren't trying to.

Jacopo is on Twitter, and writes books you can buy here and here. Alex Perry is a freelancer who wrote a novel about time-traveling stalker, as well as a heartwarming kid's book about a boy and his genetically modified pig/organ donor. She wants an agent to help her sell those books, and for you to follow her on Twitter. Jordan Breeding also writes for Paste Magazine, the Twitter, himself, and hopes to go out during a pickup basketball game.

Grant's works really are quite the read, check them out here.

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For more, check out The 5 Historical Figures Who Died The Weirdest Deaths and 6 Mysterious Deaths That'll Make You Believe In Conspiracies.

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