A playwright who never shied from death

''Ain't nothing wrong with talking about death. That's part of life. Everybody gonna die. You gonna die. I'm gonna die . . . Hell, we all gonna die."

August Wilson, ''Fences"

August Wilson was sitting at his regular table at his favorite Seattle haunt, eating the all-day breakfast at 2 in the afternoon. ''What are you willing to die for?" he asked suddenly, before laying out a list of reasons to consider taking a bullet or a fatal blow. A couple of bucks? A child? A bruised ego? A cause? This was in late January, just before the historic vote in Iraq, and Wilson imagined having to choose between democracy and death. ''They say to you, 'You think you can vote, but if you do, we will shatter you and cut your head off.' OK, then cut off my head." He paused. ''But what if they say they're going to cut off the heads of my children? If it's just me, that's OK, but not my children."

Those words have echoed in my head since the news broke this summer that Wilson had terminal liver cancer. He died last Sunday at 60 and will be memorialized next weekend in New York at the dedication of a Broadway theater named in his honor. At the time of our discussion, I was interviewing Wilson for a magazine piece coinciding with the premiere of ''Radio Golf," the 10th and final play in his majestic series about the African-American experience in America. It was a pivotal moment for Wilson: The play capped 20 years of work on his groundbreaking cycle, the crowning achievement in a career that opened up a world for blacks onstage and indelibly changed the face of the American theater. Its completion would free him up to work on other projects, maybe a novel or a comedy he called, eerily, ''The Coffin Maker Play."

But instead of kicking up his heels, his thoughts turned to death on that fine January day. He was at that point of life -- about to turn 60, at the end of a creative era -- when a man starts to take stock of this thing called life.

Did he know he was dying? Who knows, but in the end, it doesn't really matter. I can only tell you that he was preoccupied with mortality. Death, after all, has a potent presence in all of his plays. ''Seven Guitars" opens with a funeral, and ''Fences" ends with one. And Wilson was the kind of man who never missed a chance to remember the dearly departed. His life and his work reinforced the notion that attention must be paid -- to history, to ancestral roots, to family, and to friends, both celebrated and obscure.

On the first day of our interviews, he attended a memorial service for one of the many eccentric street characters he befriended in Seattle. His friend, a self-described ''crazy old Latvian" named Gunars Berzins, could often be found at a cafe in Wilson's neighborhood, bending the playwright's ears with rants about Hitler, Goering, and a cat he thought was God. Most folks would cross the street when Berzins came around, staring at the sidewalk or pulling out a cellphone to avoid a rambling conversation with the neighborhood nut. But the way Wilson saw it, this fellow could have been a character in one of his plays, one of the walking wounded whose ravings are laced with clarity and truth.

And so I found myself standing with Wilson outside the Providence Vincent House, a charitable establishment on the seedier side of Seattle that houses elderly folks who are down to their last dime. We were waiting for the memorial service to begin. Wilson's voice was tinged with regret as he chronicled the many funerals he had attended, both in recent years and long ago.

First, there was Daisy Wilson, his tenacious and principled mother who raised seven children in Pittsburgh while scraping together the rent. He has written that her life -- ''her myths, her superstitions, her prayers, the contents of her pantry" -- was the stuff of art, and in many ways, the plays were genuflections to her spirit. She died before her son's first hit, ''Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," opened triumphantly on Broadway, and he'll never forget the days leading up to her passing. She was given five days to live, but she lasted for 38, dying on March 15, 1983.

''I handled the funeral arrangements, and I never got to mourn until after it was all over," he recalled. He laughed and then remembered that his ever-practical mother initially wasn't too thrilled about her son's chosen vocation. ''OK, you're a writer," he recalled her saying. ''How you gonna eat?" She told him he would be a real writer once he wrote something for television, which finally happened when the teleplay of ''The Piano Lesson" aired in 1995. ''Hey look, Ma. I did it! I'm a writer," he said.

A man doesn't easily forget his mother's funeral, but Wilson also shared memories of many a final service. ''At my aunt's funeral, my cousin's son threw himself on the coffin and said, 'Grandma, come back,' " he recalled, conjuring an image that would make any mother weep. ''Grandma, come back," he said again somberly, as if he could see the young man prostrate on the coffin right there in the street.

And then there was the case of the couple he knew in Pittsburgh, junkies who were eternally devoted to each other. ''She died, and he went down to the most expensive place to try to steal a dress to bury her in," Wilson recalled. ''He got busted, and he couldn't go to her funeral. The people on the street took up a collection to get him out of jail, and I gave them money. Get him out of jail, man. He was devastated."

You can tell a lot about a man from the way he mourns, and Wilson treated the deaths of society's outcasts with the seriousness others might reserve for a prophet or a prince. At Berzins's memorial service, an uncomfortable silence fell over the room when it came time to praise the departed. ''Mongolian horses," Wilson said quietly, wiping his face with a handkerchief. He then recounted one of his friend's familiar rants, a story that began with the decreasing population of Mongolian horses and ended with an apocalyptic vision of drought, famine, and the destruction of the planet. By the time Wilson was finished, the people in the room were nodding in recognition, inspired by this soft-spoken man who found beauty and brilliance in another man's pain.

''Oh man, a little part of my world has slipped away," he said after the service, talking about his friend but also reflecting on the inevitable passage of time. ''You stick around long enough, and you look up and it's 20 years later." He marveled at the fact that a whole generation had grown up reading his plays; when he was coming up, the only black playwrights he knew of were Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins, hardly household names. ''That's what gets me, man," he said. ''I meet these guys, and they're like 29 years old. Ever since they were aware of theater, I was part of their fabric. I just discovered that, and it surprised me."

In his later years, Wilson developed an interest in drawing, and he seemed to be looking forward to experimenting with other forms and other mediums. ''See, visual artists live long, and writers die young," he said. ''I'm moving over to painting. You can't get me yet! Go buy me some paint!" He was joking, of course, but now, it's hard not to wish he had gone out and purchased oils by the barrel.

Wilson was set to be buried yesterday in his native Pittsburgh, and he will be memorialized next Sunday. There will be speeches and music and laughter and tears. But it occurs to me that maybe Wilson was asking the wrong question so many months ago in Seattle. In the end, it doesn't so much matter how a man dies, but how he lives. So let us praise this famous playwright, but let us also remember the humble man who found beauty where others only saw blight.

Patti Hartigan wrote about theater for the Globe from 1987 to 2001. She can be reached at pattihartigan@gmail.com.