Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“I used to be surprised and shocked because old people accepted the calamities and deaths of their old friends with seeming equanimity. Now I realise that, had they not done so, they would have gone mad.”
~ James Lees-Milne, diary, November 25, 1975
~ James Lees-Milne, diary, November 25, 1975
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today … to write our obituaries
People are imagining their place in posterity as the ‘death positivity’ movement sweeps America
Because here’s a fact about mourning — when someone close to you dies, even if it’s expected, it’s like a bomb has gone off. And you and your family are wandering around in the rubble, shivering in the wind. You don’t know what day it is, and you keep forgetting why you went into a room. Eyeglasses are lost and appointments forgotten as you try to deal with the fact that this person who was so essential is somehow, incredibly no longer on this Earth. This fact keeps hitting you, like the shock waves after an explosion. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes / The Nerves sit ceremonious, like tombs …”
At this time, the visits and calls from friends are like the pieces of a quilt. And the quilt pieces come together into a blanket and warm you, getting you through this time of shock and sorrow. It doesn’t matter if all they say is “I’m sorry.” They don’t have to stay long. They don’t have to be clever. The thought really is enough. It’s enough that they’re there in the stuffy funeral parlor, or at the luncheon, looking at pictures of your mom and nodding as you babble, “Wasn’t she pretty? Wasn’t she fun?”
Fewer people are going to memorial services these days, according to surveys by the National Funeral Directors Association. In 2013, 10.3% of respondents had not gone to a funeral in the last five years. In 2019, almost 37% had not gone to any memorial service in five years.
This isn’t a good trend. So take my parents’ advice and send a card, make a call or, better yet, go to the wake or the funeral. You’ll probably feel a little awkward, and get bad coffee. But what you’ll give to a grieving family is priceles
My Obituary
Will it merit a full column in The Post or The Times
or just a squib by a relative late for work?
Will it mention awards I didn’t win,
poems that didn’t quite scan,
and how a student asked me once
if “To a Daughter Leaving Home”
was my penance for driving a daughter away?
It will surely say I was born in the Bronx,
spending the first few weeks of my life
in the hospital nursery, alone. Which may
account for my chronic melancholy
and why I keep blaming my surgeon father
who tried to do his best for me
but whose anger always mirrored mine.
Some obituaries written years in advance
are stored in the newspaper’s basement vault,
like turkey vultures asleep in their nests,
just waiting for death to catch up with life.
Let any newspaper where my obituary appears
be used to keep the floor clean under the dog’s dish.
And let my “survived by…” children remember me
not by a list of ambiguous facts collected
like so much mathematical data, but by my usual
obsessions: rising bread and falling leaves.
The Obama Portraits Have Become, In Essence, Pilgrimage Sites
“Stories of visitors praying or breaking down in tears before the portraits circulated on social media.” (Not unlike Jerusalem or Lourdes.) Says the director of the National Portrait Gallery in D.C., “It’s a form of what I call secular pilgrimage. Much like people go to Graceland or John Lennon’s grave — the response has that quality to it.” – Artnet