He died at 41. Here is what Wikipedia has to say:
In January 1967, Cassady traveled to Mexico with fellow prankster George “Barely Visible” Walker and Cassady’s longtime girlfriend Anne Murphy. In a beachside house just south of Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, they were joined by Barbara Wilson and Walter Cox. All-night storytelling, speed drives in Walker’s Lotus Elan, and the use of LSD made for a classic Cassady performance — “like a trained bear,” Carolyn Cassady once said. Cassady was beloved for his ability to inspire others to love life. Yet at rare times he was known to express regret over his wild life, especially as it affected his family. At one point Cassady took Cox, then 19, aside and told him; “twenty years of fast living—there’s just not much left, and my kids are all screwed up. Don’t do what I have done.”
During the next year, Cassady’s life became less stable, and the pace of his travels more frenetic. He left Mexico in May, traveling to San Francisco, Denver, New York City, and points in between. Cassady then returned to Mexico in September and October (stopping in San Antonio, on the way to visit his oldest daughter who had just given birth to his first grandchild), visited Ken Kesey’s Oregon farm in December, and spent the New Year with Carolyn at a friend’s house near San Francisco. Finally, in late January 1968, Cassady returned to Mexico once again.
On February 3, 1968, Cassady attended a wedding party in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. After the party, he went walking along a railroad track to reach the next town, but passed out in the cold and rainy night wearing nothing but a T-shirt and jeans. In the morning, he was found in a coma by the tracks, reportedly by Anton Black, later a professor at El Paso Community College, who carried Cassady over his shoulders to the local post office building. Cassady was then transported to the closest hospital where he died a few hours later on February 4, four days short of his 42nd birthday.
The exact cause of Cassady’s death remains uncertain. Those who attended the wedding party confirm that he took an unknown quantity of secobarbital, a powerful barbiturate sold under the brand name Seconal. The physician who performed the autopsy wrote simply, “general congestion in all systems.” When interviewed later, the physician stated that he was unable to give an accurate report because Cassady was a foreigner and there were drugs involved. “Exposure” is commonly cited as his cause of death, although his widow believes he may have died of renal failure.
To my mind, Cassady kind of embodies the YOLO mindset. But life is everywhere. It is in the room where you are now. It is in the eyes of those you know. It is outside of your window, in the growth and the sleep of all that lives. It seems to me that in PURSUING life, that you have forgotten how to live it. You are chasing what is not already there within you. Being empty, you go in endless circles, which you justify by calling it “drinking the marrow of life”.
There is nothing wrong with going slow. There is nothing wrong with savoring all the plenty which is blossoming everywhere, if you only learn how to see.
I have taken to reading motivational quotes to myself in the morning, one of which is Chief Tecumsah’s call to “love your life, perfect your life, beautify everything in your life. Seek to make your life long and it purpose in the service of your people.”
All of this may seem irrelevant. But when Paypal, for example, bans InfoWars, the roots of that possibility extend back, in some ways, to how Cassady chose to live his life, to what he chose to value. He should not be a hero. He should not be a role model. But this spirit lives on. It leads minds into unnecessary vanity, stupidity, ugliness, pettiness, and ultimately aggression and violence.
Either you are with us or against us, college students are taught. Either you are good or you are bad, and if you are bad, you cannot be reasoned with. All of the beauty, all of the LIFE, resides on one side, and not the other. All of the love, decency, courage lie on one side, and not the other. The other people are ugly. They are abominations. They hate freedom, they hate tolerance, they hate everything all good people stand for. Trump is literally Hitler, because he is not one of us, and Hitler is the only symbol of evil we can all agree on.