Difficult to determine the exact point when a word or phrase departs reality and becomes weightless, perfunctory, without the least credibility. When, for example, was the last time you took seriously anyone’s—a friend’s, a sales clerk’s, a begging homeless person’s—exhortation to “Have a nice day”? Some pump it up to “a nice weekend,” “holiday,” “summer,” “fiscal quarter,” but all to little avail. Such pure verbal rubbish has the phrase become that “Have a nice day” is now included as one of the country’s three most common lies: The other two are “The check is in the mail” and “Don’t worry, sweetie, I’ve had a vasectomy.”
Another phrase about to enter the status of verbal inanity is the response, when a death is reported, that runs, “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family.” The phrase is usually uttered—often “muttered” is closer to it—by public officials. President Obama used it quite often, never very convincingly. When President Trump uses it, it is, somehow, even less convincing. I have heard sports broadcasters spray it around when a famous athlete pegs out. I should imagine it is big in show business, possibly, among actors, with a tear added at no extra charge.
The only thing more difficult than paying condolences, in my experience, is receiving them. Easily the most awkward moment at any funeral service is when one has to pass before and greet the family of the deceased. A few words of comfort, some expression of sympathy, is expected, indeed required. To say one is sorry won’t do, and besides it is inaccurate, unless your failure to supply blood or donate an organ directly caused the person’s death. To mention that you will miss him seems trivial next to the effect of his loss on his family. To claim one loved him and will miss him sorely is likely to call for the suspension of disbelief on the part of the bereaved.
Candor, on the other hand, though tempting, is never an alternative. “He never really got it, did he?” is not likely to go down well with a man’s grieving wife. “He really could be a bit of a bore, especially toward the end” doesn’t sound quite the right note, either. Nor “I never understood what you saw in him.” Nor, again, “I was always impressed by the extent to which he overestimated his charm.” Best, too, to hold back on “He died owing me $500, but no hurry in repaying it.” Perhaps the rule for paying condolence is that which W. H. Auden lay down for Catholic confession: “Be brief, be blunt, be gone,” but without the blunt part.
Most of the condolence paid me at the death of family has been less than memorable. I had remarkable parents, but I cannot recall, at either of their funerals, anyone comforting me by saying anything remarkable about either of them. The one piece of memorable condolence I have ever received came from my friend Norman Podhoretz. When someone very dear to me died, he sent me a note saying that the only recompense I could take from this death was that nothing as sad was likely to happen to me for the remainder of my life. Turns out he was right.
The Irish have their wakes, the Jews their shivas, but even with the lubricants of whiskey or the comforts of religious ritual, condolence remains awkward for nearly everyone. It should be more awkward for those public figures who have fastened on to that useless gurgle—“thoughts and prayers,” sometimes “prayers and thoughts”—a formulation unconvincing at best, never less than glib. How much time did an Obama or does a Trump take to devote thought (forget about prayer) to the death of a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan or a Marine in Iraq? Less, no doubt, than a nanosecond, which, at last calculation, is a billionth of a second. Out of the mouth of a politician, that “thoughts and prayers” shibboleth has all the resonant sincerity of the sound made by compressing a whoopee cushion.
The larger problem, of course, is big D, not Dallas but Death itself. Everyone may know that he or she is going to die, yet, as Turgenev somewhere says, death, that most democratic of events, is itself an old joke that strikes each of us afresh. All but the most carefully chosen, the most heartfelt, words in its presence are rendered otiose. Unspeakable in its profundity, it is scarcely a surprise that death renders us speechless.
May anyone who is reading this not be in need of condolence for years to come. But should the need arise, if anyone tells you that you are in his thoughts and prayers, my advice is to look that person straight in the eye and tell him to have a nice day.
