It’s almost always a mistake not to speak of the dead, especially when one has good things to say. I passed up a chance to do so a while back, and I continue to regret it. An acquaintance — one on the cusp of becoming a friend — died in his middle sixties. He was a widower and a painter, an abstract expressionist, who lived in the same building I do and earned his living as a designer — chiefly, of children’s toys. He was a quiet man, but he liked a joke, and whenever I ran into him in our building or the neighborhood I made it a point to tell him one. There was nothing of the show- off about him, and it was only gradually, after innumerable meetings, that I learned how much he knew: about jazz, about classical music, about modern literature. He was impressive in his gentle understatedness.
A few weeks after he died, a memorial service was held in an art gallery with perhaps a hundred people present. No music was played, and the element of religion — he was apparently a thoroughly secularized Jew — was entirely absent. Someone played the master of ceremonies. Seven or eight people were designated to speak. Two of them read utterly negligible poems. Old friends told amusing stories, many of them about his ability to stand aside and coolly view scenes of domestic chaos. A few spoke of his earlier, bohemian days as a painter.
Listening to all this, I felt no one had come close to capturing his quality. This was an elegant and serious man, and no one seemed to have noticed, or at least thought it worth mentioning. The master of ceremonies, who wished to give the evening something of a therapeutic note, invited everyone in the audience to speak. I thought of doing so and then — out of a slight nervousness? out of fear of seeming unauthentic? out of a worry that it was not my place to do so? — decided not to. Whenever I think about him now, I feel a slight stab of guilt.
When my mother died, I felt I had to speak. The rabbi officiating at her funeral service simply did not know her well enough to talk about her in a penetrating or even mildly interesting way. When he did speak, it was, alas, in cliches of the sort that give no comfort. Whether I gave comfort to anyone other than myself I do not know, but I am pleased to have spoken about the extraordinary woman who was my mother.
I also once spoke at the memorial service of an older friend who I thought had a splendid gift for enjoying life: He loved travel, food and drink, the company of elegant women. He had as a son-in-law a rather dour clergyman for whom my friend’s gift seemed a dubious one, and as it turned out, the son-in- law spoke less in cliches than in generalities: about the attractions of death, chiefly. He might have been talking about anyone, but certainly not about the remarkable man who was his father-in-law.
I was asked to speak at a memorial service for my friend Erich Heller, the literary critic, a man of great good humor, powerful learning, and more than a touch of intellectual snobbery. When I saw the program for the service, I could not but note that, of the five speakers, two were men whom Erich found, as he might have said, clownish in their pretensions and non-existent in their intellectual qualities. If people do spin in their graves, then as the pair spoke — solipsistically and clownishly — about him, Erich must have been spinning in his.
I later learned that both these men had put themselves forward; they had not been asked but offered to speak. An axiom in these matters is that you never allow anyone to speak at a memorial service who too insistently offers, for he will almost certainly speak about himself, which is what these two men did, over, you might say, Erich’s dead body. One of these men has since died, and a friend of mine has exacted from me the promise that the other not be permitted to speak at his memorial service, should he predecease me.
The memorial service is rather like “live” television — anything can happen, everything go wrong. I recall such a service for a Chicago publisher who had what I thought a needlessly complex sense of humor: quippy, overly ironic, frequently inappropriate, generally missing its target. Five of the six people asked to speak all emphasized the poor man’s sense of humor, furnishing, as I recall, no examples. (It was dangerously reminiscent of the joke about the funeral service for the man about whom no one has a good word. Finally, a man gets up to speak, clears his throat, and announces, “His brother was even worse.”) Only the publisher’s son saved the day by speaking about the man’s genuine goodness as a father.
Recollection of such events is enough to turn one’s attention to one’s own memorial service — or, given the possibilities for minor disaster, to the question of whether one wishes to have such a service at all. I can think of three people I shouldn’t mind speaking about me at such a service: one with a reputation for truth-telling, one with a fine ebullience whose comments are certain to remind any audience of life’s delights, and one of whose love I am certain. I suppose I ought to make a note of this, and, while I am at it, choose the music I should like to have played: Mozart, Borodin, Ravel. Then again perhaps it might be better to forget the whole thing and instead leave a few thousand dollars to throw a party at which the word “death” is not permitted. This was what Randolph Churchill, son of Winston, instructed his heirs to arrange:
I desire that my corpse shall be disposed of either in the churchyard of East Berghold or in the gardens of Stour [his home], as speedily as possible and with the least inconvenience to other people or expense to my Estate. Any of my friends who care to attend my sepulture shall be entertained to baked meats and a cold collation at Stour and drink anything that may happen to be in my house. There shall be no memorial services. Bones (not my own) shall be provided for my dogs and bitches; but steps must be taken that the bones shall not be bones of contention nor treated like those of Jezebel.
“Of all the things in the world I think the least about,” allowed Bernard B. Jacobs, in his day one of the two powers in the theater-owning and play- producing Shubert Organization, “it’s what happens after you die. Dead is dead.” Jacobs, who died in 1996 at the age of eighty, was nonetheless ushered out with a long obituary in the New York Times that spoke in a flattering way about his lack of pretentiousness. Sub specie aeternitatis, judged in the light of eternity, making a fuss over the dead doesn’t seem to make much sense.
Quite right — and yet, and yet. . . . One cannot help imagining what the world will make of one after one has shuffled off to some place rather distant from Buffalo. One knows justice is limited in life, but is it any greater afterwards? Perhaps, but not, as a reader of obituaries I have come to suspect, immediately afterwards.
In his foreword to The Last Word, a collection of fairly recent obituaries from the New York Times, Russell Baker writes that “the obituaries are best left until last.” They are the first thing I turn to in the New York Times; and, in fact, if it weren’t for the obituaries, I probably wouldn’t read the daily Times at all. Not that the obituaries are all that grand, but they do at least let me know who has been taken out of the game from those leagues — the arts, scholarship, intellectual life — in which I have an interest.
Sometimes the obits provide charming surprises. I like especially the modest ones. “Francine Katzenbogen, 51; Gave Cats the Lap of Luxury.” Or: ” Adelma Grenier Simmons, 93, Authority on Herbs, Is Dead.” Or again: “Eldon W. Lyle, 89, a Fighter of Diseases Affecting Roses.” And I seem to have kept the obit of a few years back whose headline read, “David Fleay, 85, Whose Specialty Was the Platypus.” “Rest,” I found myself muttering after reading it, “in Platypus.”
For many years obituaries in the New York Times were written by Alden Whitman — the Angel of Death, as I came to think him — and most seemed to me perfunctory and some badly politicized (Whitman was a man of the Left). I don’t recall if any of his obituaries were actually vengeful, but if they were it would not have been the first time that people have used the obituary as a weapon to kick an enemy who was already down. When the famous (in his day) agnostic Robert Ingersoll died, one newspaper couldn’t resist noting: ” Robert Ingersoll died yesterday. Perhaps he knows better now.”
In recent years, however, the obituaries have improved as the Times began to interest itself in people whose lives had a charming oddity — people who did good works anonymously (a man who gave away gloves to the homeless), or invented things that you would have thought came into being on their own (the inventors of the Rolodex and the zoot suit, the designer of the Corvette, the promoter of the New York Marathon, the coach who started the huddle in football), or had a slightly silly success (“Bob Wilvers, 65, Ad Executive Put ‘Plop, Plop’ with ‘Fizz, Fizz’ in an old Alka-Selzer Commercial”), or had fleeting fame (the little boy for whom Babe Ruth promised to hit a home run in 1926), and so on.
In death as in life, luck is an element. I seem to remember that the novelist John Dos Passos’s obituary was demoted in importance because he happened to die on the same day as the Egyptian political leader Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser. The New York Times nowadays tries, insofar as is in its power, to make death seem comprehensive through its selection of obits (a word that sounds, as Thomas Mallon recently noted, like a snack food). On a characteristic day — Sunday, January 4, 1998, for example — it ran obituaries of a master grower of bonsai trees, a Green Beret leader in Vietnam, a former football coach at Rutgers, and the mayor of Scottsdale, Arizona, during the town’s period of greatest growth.
Almost by their nature, obituaries tend to be skeletal (some metaphors are impossible to pass up). Usually not all that much space is provided: T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock may have measured life with coffee spoons, but death is measured out in column inches. Facts must be fitted in, economical use of anecdotes and quotations made, and on to the next corpse. The Times generally assigns its obits to writers specializing in the deceased’s own specialty: art critics on artists, military writers on generals, and so forth. But I have noted an interesting general-assignment obituary writer with the somewhat overloaded name of Robert McG. Thomas, Jr., who occasionally gets beyond the facts and the rigid formula of the obit to touch on — of all things to find in the New York Times — a deeper truth. Thus Thomas on one Fred Rosenstiel, “who spent his life planting gardens to brighten the lives of his fellow New Yorkers, and to alleviate an abiding sadness in his heart, died at Western Queens Community Hospital in Astoria. He was eighty- three.” The sadness, we learn later in the obituary, derived from Mr. Rosenstiel’s inability to “forgive himself for surviving the Holocaust, friends said.” A fine touch.
If one reads the obituaries with a relieved sense of “there but for the grace of God go I (since I’m damn far from ready to go),” one also, as one grows older, tends to be dismayed by the deaths of people one’s own age or even younger. Now that I have hit sixty, I find it much more comforting to begin a day in which the obituary page lists three people who died in their nineties and one who made it to 105. It cheered me to read about “Gamblin’ Rose Hamburger, a race track handicapper who beat all the odds by living to 105, precisely.” On the other, sadder hand, William Vickrey, who won a Nobel Prize in economics in 1996, died, at eighty-two, three days after his prize was announced, which must have been extremely irritating.
Henry James somewhere says that, after the age of fifty, someone one knows dies every day. Not quite true, but nearly so: If one does not know the person who has died, one knows someone who knew him. Sometimes one is visited, in the obits, by figures out of one’s past. On January 2, I read, “Richard Elman, Novelist, Poet and Teacher, Is Dead at 63.” I knew Dick Elman in the early 1960s. He was afire with literary ambition in those days. It never worked out. He had, to begin with, the bad luck to have the same name (one “l” and one “n” short) as Richard Ellmann, the biographer of James Joyce and Yeats and Oscar Wilde, and those who didn’t simply confuse the two tended to compare them — not to Dick Elman’s favor. He was leftist when I knew him, but the political element evidently grew stronger in him, so that, in his obituary, it is mentioned that he “described himself as a Socialist.” His books never received much in the way of serious attention; and as he grew older, his publishers grew more obscure. He picked up teaching jobs at different universities. His first marriage went sour, he contracted another, had a daughter from each. The obit’s photograph shows a man in dishevelment, bald with unruly long hair on the sides, squinting into the sun. Not an easy life, my guess is, with a higher than the normal quotient of disappointment.
Am I reading too much into Dick Elman’s obituary? Perhaps. But obituaries, which tend to summarize a life, also call out for such judgments. Sometimes they do this more quietly than at other times. The phrase “There are no known survivors” at the close of an obituary invariably suggests sadness to me. Reading the obituary of the Beat Generation figure Herbert Huncke — a man whose life was filled with drug addiction, petty crime, and squalor of various sorts (“he sold drugs at times and himself at others,” his obit notes) — one wonders about the reaction of his sole survivor, “his half brother, Dr. Brian Huncke of Chicago.” One remembers, too, that such lives, good copy though they make for the obituarist, represent vast heartbreak for their families.
Reading obituaries, one cannot help wondering about one’s own. Will it appear at all? How many factual errors will it have? Will it contain something really stupid, as did a recent obituary of the Sicilian writer Danilo Dolci, who is described as “the Studs Terkel of Sicily” because he once produced a book of interviews? How brief will it be? (A woman calls the newspaper to place an obituary notice for her recently deceased husband and is told that they charge by the word. “Very well,” she says, “I’d like it to read, ‘Schwartz dead.'” The minimum fee, she is told, is $ 50 and for that you get five words. “Very well,” she says, “make it, ‘Schwartz dead. Cadillac for sale.'”)
These are not questions that torture me as I try to sleep, but rather ones I think about from time to time when reading about the deaths of others. Besides, I am confident that, whatever might be written about me, I would be sure to find it inadequate. I hope its writer at least has the common decency to begin my obit, “Joseph Epstein, the writer whose works held great appeal to a small but select audience of highly cultivated readers, died last night of natural causes, a great-grandchild on his lap, while listening to the Schubert Octet in F Major. He was ninety-seven and in full possession of his faculties. Known for his suavity and charm, his penetrating intellect and amusing subtlety, Epstein. . . .”
Writing one’s own obituary reminds me of the only story I know about an obituarist, “The Cemetery,” by J. C. Squire. In the story, a poet accepts a job in the obituary department at what must be the Times of London. Out of a natural curiosity, he checks the files for his own obituary and finds it all too brief and disappointing. So he adds a bit to it, and then, on other occasions, he adds more — in fact, quite a bit more, so that it eventually puffs up into a major article. Then one day he gets a bad conscience about what he has done and cuts his obituary back to the bone — making it even briefer than he originally found it. Feeling better, he goes off to lunch and, crossing the street, is hit by a car and instantly killed. The obituary is printed in its drastically cut version and generates outrage at what is felt to be the vast injustice visited upon the poet. His work is revived, his reputation restored, and his life proves posthumously a great success.
The editor of The Last Word, Marvin Siegel, closes his collection of obituaries on a thumping ironic note. The last five obituaries he reprints include one of a Brooklyn restaurant owner who was famous for his artery- clogging cheese cake but who himself lived till ninety-two; a seven-year-old girl who died piloting her own plane; a woman who lived a thousand days longer than she wished and had to undergo the full horror of life in a nursing home; a sixteen-year-old girl shot by a boy who didn’t like the way she looked at him; and an account of burial at the potter’s field on Hart Island outside New York City.
The point is, I assume, that the ugly customer, as Hazlitt referred to death, or the eternal Footman, as T. S. Eliot called him, isn’t very discriminating in his choice of victims.
In his great book, The Ancient City, Fustel de Coulanges writes about the founding of Greek cities around the gravesites of ancestors and reminds us how much of life in the ancient world was organized around the dead: “All antiquity,” de Coulanges writes, “was persuaded that without burial the soul was miserable, and that by burial it became forever happy. It was not to display their grief that they performed the funeral ceremony, it was for the rest and happiness of the dead.” Maintenance of the gravesites, including elaborate rituals for remembering and even attempting to feed the dead, were central to the lives of the living.
Today, almost all the old pieties toward the dead have been vastly attenuated. Great numbers of people nowadays are cremated and do not even have graves. Church-going appears to be less, and so — even when his family wishes to have religious funerary rites — more often than not the clergy do not really know the deceased and have nothing of note to say about him. Most people under fifty do not own graves for their own burial, in the way that earlier generations did; the majority assume, I take it, that they probably will not die in the city in which they currently live, but instead in — who knows? — California, Tuscany, or Paris. All this has made speaking well of the dead more significant than ever.
At a higher level than the obituarist is the memorialist, who writes under less pressure and usually at greater length. Unlike the obituarist, the memorialist may linger over the mysteries of character, attempting to tighten up loose screws, ravel back unraveled edges, explain the hitherto inexplicable — attempt, in short, to make sense of the life of the person who has died. Isaiah Berlin, who himself recently died, did this very well. Thus far no one has provided a similar service for him, and most of what has been written about him has seemed exaggerated. Exaggeration is one of the great, perhaps the greatest, traps awaiting anyone who writes or speaks about the dead. The point is nicely made by the best joke I have ever heard about memorial services.
This is the joke about a Mr. Nussbaum, who comes to his rabbi to announce that his beloved dog Buster has just died and that he would be grateful if the rabbi would say a memorial service for the dog. The rabbi, after expressing his condolences, tells Mr. Nussbaum that Jews are not permitted to say memorial services for animals. Mr. Nussbaum informs the rabbi that he has no other family, that Buster meant everything to him, that he would be willing to make a serious contribution to the rabbi’s special fund for working with inner-city children if he would accommodate him here. The rabbi, not an inflexible man, tells Mr. Nussbaum that, all right, he will do the service for Buster on the next day in the small synagogue at 2:30. And the following day, the rabbi goes through the service and speaks about the dog for roughly fifteen minutes. Mr. Nussbaum, alone in the audience, listens, tears in his eyes. When it is over, he approaches the rabbi, hands him a check for $ 5,000, and says: “Rabbi, I shall always be grateful to you for what you did for me and for Buster. It meant the world to me. And what you said about my beloved dog moved me greatly. Do you know, Rabbi, till this afternoon I had no idea how much Buster had done for Israel.”
To have died without anyone’s having captured the combination of one’s idiosyncrasies, or understood the inner drama of one’s life, seems a profound sadness. Lady Murasaki, in The Tale of Genji, notes that novels get written because “the storyteller’s own experience of men and things . . . has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.”
Our experience of dead family and friends above all must not be kept shut up in the heart. We owe it to the dead and to ourselves to tell their story, to get it as straight as possible, to pass it along with sympathy reinforced by a dedication to truth. It is crucial that the last word not be — like that of Mr. Nussbaum’s rabbi — a shabby, foolish, or false word.
Joseph Epstein is the author of Life Sentences, a collection of literary essays recently published by W. W. Norton.
