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Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. —Virginia Woolf
Sometimes I wish my first word was “quote,” so that on my death bed, my last words could be “end quote.” —Steven Wright
as part of a PR campaign by the funeral industry, which felt it was more customer-friendly than undertaker. The term was chosen after a call for ideas in Embalmer’s Monthly
I know that in China, roughly 27,573 people die each day. In India, it’s around 26,520. In the United States, 7,700, give or take. In Switzerland, it’s about 179. In Micronesia, it’s just 2. In Liechtenstein, 1. Why not move there?
What would you write if you had to write your obituary? Today, right now. What comes to mind? What memories, days, moments? What people and experiences? I realize, at first glance, that the idea of writing one’s own obituary while still alive may sound morbid. It’s not, though. I promise you. It’s a needed reminder of who you are, of what truly matters. Because it’s your life and there’s still time to write it. Before I have to.
It lasted as long as it takes to try and fight the voice in my head that says, Other people can change. Not you.
Dating in one’s forties is a radically different experience than dating in the carefree days of one’s twenties. More pain now. More history. More exes and sometimes children. More lonely, more longing, more guarded.
Now I rarely made an effort. I’m not sure why. Instead, I waited, a kind of magical thinking, for life to mend itself, for someone to find me. Superb plan, I know.
I couldn’t stop talking. I hated myself.
winked at her like we were old friends. I was floundering badly, watching myself, a kind of out-of-body experience where I was repulsed by this person. Me.
I sat by the window, opened a few inches, listening to the rain. And just that clearly, in the muddled, whiskey-soaked place where terrible ideas pose as good ones, I knew what I had to do. It made perfect sense. I would write my obituary.
Bud Stanley, the first man to perform open-heart surgery on himself, died today in a hot-air balloon accident. He was 44.
Although he didn’t speak his first words until the age of four (“Where are my pants?”) he had a command of seven languages, in which he wrote, taught, and lectured. He was a competitive ballroom dancer.
Your identity is more interesting than your biography. That was another one from one of the self-help books or the podcasts or talks that Tim sent me. Aren’t we all more than our résumé? Aren’t we more than the college we attended and the places we’ve worked? Aren’t we a million things that are so subtle and nuanced that most people never see them or experience them? Aren’t we also that moment—that nothing moment—on a cool spring day when, stopped by a lilac bush in bloom, by the breeze moving the leaves and full violet flowers, the hint of the perfume smell in the wind and the sound of
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I possessed the universal college worldview that everyone else had it figured out, felt passionately about their major, and had a keen sense of the kind of life they wanted, and that I, alone, was clueless.
This other self, this other me, seemed to be out there, waiting, if only I could find him.
Where once newsrooms were places bustling with energy and noise, typewriters clapping, lead keys snapping actual ink on paper, the bell of the line return, the air thick with cigarette smoke, now it feels more like a place where microchips are made. Clean, quiet, thickly carpeted floors, noise-reducing ceiling tiles, midrise partitions for a modicum of privacy. Phones don’t ring; they hum, cricket-like. Almost no one speaks, as they are plugged in, headphones on, looking like air traffic controllers.
a man best photographed in sepia.
Maybe words don’t matter much. Maybe it’s all in the unsaid.
I stared at him with the look of a man who doesn’t quite understand the doctor’s diagnosis.
“We’ve served our tour,” Howard said. “We’re done. Oh sure, we had a few bright, shining moments. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, D-Day, the moon landing, antibiotics, Pringles. But the bad outweighs the good.” We clinked glasses.
What he gave me was … he made me see differently. He made me see that it all mattered. And I worry … I don’t think anything matters to you anymore, Bud. And that kind of breaks my heart.” I felt the lump in my throat that made it difficult to swallow, felt the heat from the blood in my ears. The shock of the words, of the realization that they were true and had been true for some time.
“You know who cares when you die?” he asked to the bustling street. “Almost no one. Your spouse. Your kids. Your best friend. The rest? After about two weeks … hell … a few days … and you know what they’re talking about? The new truffle-and-mushroom frozen pizza at Trader Joe’s.
“You’re so dumb I can’t process it.
“There are these nuns,” Howard said. “We ran this story a while back. They practice something called memento mori. Latin for remember that you die. They sit and pray, meditating on this notion, that in every action we should remember, have to remember, that we die. When they were asked if it was depressing, they said no, quite the opposite. They said it makes life so … almost impossibly beautiful.”
To have come here and thought, Perhaps I can make a go. To come to the realization that you didn’t, that your chances were running out, that time—something that once seemed to move so slowly—had sped up when you weren’t looking. That it was late in the game and you were losing big.
The first snow brought an almost impossible beauty, a blanket of quiet, created a kind of painting from another time.
He was the kind of handsome that caused people to stare.
“Howard said I’ve given up on life,” I blurted out, another of those times I didn’t know I was going to speak. “Bit harsh.” “I thought so. Well, not in those words. He said I was an obituary writer who didn’t know how to live.” Tim said nothing, a habit of his in conversation, knowing that I would fill the void. “I know how to live,” I said. “I’m just … I’m in a transitional phase, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”
Tim sat, smiling, waiting, a thing I would come to learn he did, in no rush. It made me want to fill the silence.
“They had married late, my parents,” I continued, surprised that I was still talking.
You can fall in love with someone from their smile. He drew you in with that smile. Be my friend, it said. Enter my rare and endlessly interesting world.
Something about the way he asked these intimate questions, the way he waited so calmly, put me at ease. His manner, his voice, resonant and easy to listen to. He spoke a bit slower than normal. Sometimes he would stop, midsentence, a funny expression coming over his face, looking out somewhere, as if, perhaps, an idea had dawned on him.
Have you ever sat with someone as they died?” He asked this brightly, as if he were asking if I’ve tried the new Honey Nut Cheerios.
He seemed to know everyone, and yet, when you were with him, you felt as if you were his best friend.
He fell in love with beauty, he said. The beauty of people, of possibility, of art. He read and wondered about his life when he got back.
Are we ever fully honest with someone else? I don’t mean to suggest outright lies, but do we really express those quieter, deeper feelings? Those amorphous, hazy things, core things that even we struggle to admit to ourselves. Do we share everything?
I just feel … different.” “About what?” “I don’t know. Life. Us. I just need some time.” “Us?” She winced. “No … not … us …” I knew she was lying. That’s the thing about an affair. You know. Of course you know. But you lie to yourself. At least I did.
She left, taking her things, which was most everything. I was happy for her. I was. In the way that someone can be happy for someone else but also sort of wish them dead. I would soon turn forty, and that number, that idea, rocked me. It wasn’t possible. It felt like the end of something. My marriage, my youth. I was falling.
Doug.”
‘We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom.’”
Did they feel that terrible longing for lost time, a thing not done, that wincing regret that keeps the mind in a hamster wheel of I should have, I should have, I should have?
The priest said, “Mrs. Gauss. Please. I know you wanted to say a few words.” “Seventy-one years we were married. Seventy-one years. And he was a philandering, moody prick most of it. An absolute prick.” And here, in a gesture of great gusto, she raised the bony middle finger of her right hand and forcefully presented it to the casket.
oak tree
“No. I am the rare male who is no threat, quite literally. Sexless, short, seat-bound.” “New this fall on NBC.”
He was finely calibrated, my dear friend. He rolled with my too-often asinine comments. But underneath he was always thinking, always trying to put the pieces together, to reach further, understand more.
I laughed until I was sobbing. I wanted to die. I really did. But I also wanted to live, by just the tiniest fraction more. I just didn’t know how. You remind me of that guy. This … person who refuses to step into his life, watching, commenting. Maybe we’re all obituary writers. And our job is to write the best story we can now.”
“A group of penguins in the water is called a raft,” he said. “On land they become a waddle.” He sighed, the weight of his knowledge pleasing to him.
“You’re not writing the story of their life. You’re writing stories from their life.” Howard said that a good obituary should show readers some aspect of the deceased person’s world—the sleep habits of a midnight-to-8-a.m. shift baker, the Christmas card collection of a neighborhood barber, the Kiwanis Club award of a longtime den mother for the Cub Scouts.
They made a pact. No sadness at death. No regrets. Whoever went first, the other would dance on their coffin. They laughed about it. They listened to Dean Martin records and, when the pain wasn’t too bad, danced in the living room overlooking Arthur Avenue, the ancient Italian bakeries and espresso bars, the old men in the folding chairs talking about the weather and the Yankees, the twentysomethings hustling to the city, not a soul in the world knowing these two people were dancing in the face of death.
