I hereby resurrect the Rot In Hell Awards I started in 2006 for rapscallions who die, lest others attempt the rehabilitation of their reputations.
In the case of Ailes, his life is so filled with travesty that the challenge is to find something mildly neutral to say about him. Even The New York Times can't do better than republish a statement from his wife about him being a "living husband" (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!).
Strike 1: he was rich.
Strike 2: he was a conservative propagandist of the most loathesome kind, a facilitator of faux news (the news part of the Fox network) before even someone like Donald Trump gave a name to it.
Strike 3: he abused women who worked for him.
Y'er out!
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
My Future
Today is my 63rd birthday and in The New York Times there are three obituaries that remind me how short my days are now.
One has the death of Hermann Zapf, designer of 200 typefaces, including ZapfDingbats (see below), which I use in my work (sparingly). He died at the remarkable age of 96.
A second obit announces the death of the man who prosecuted cult-leader and assassin Charles Manson, and later became a crime writer, Vincent Bugliosi. He was 80.
A third is the less-well-known Vincent Musetto, a retired New York Post headline writer, one who was best remembered for HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR. The story was of a grisly crime on April 13, 1983, involving decapitation. Musetto died at 74.
If I follow far less famously in their footsteps, I can expect to live 11, 17 or, less likely, 33 more years.
All of which brings me to a gospel passage pointed out to me recently. It contains what in earlier stages of life I might not have considered a remarkable pearl of wisdom, but today, thinking of life and death as proximate things, it does.
The evangelist John puts in the risen Jesus' mouth the following words, addressed to the apostle Peter:
I am comforted, I don't quite know why, just knowing that this is all in the natural order of things. It need not involve decapitation, nor adversary action in the legal system nor require of me a lasting burst of graphic creativity. I will just be carried there.
One has the death of Hermann Zapf, designer of 200 typefaces, including ZapfDingbats (see below), which I use in my work (sparingly). He died at the remarkable age of 96.
 |
| Zapf's dingbats |
A second obit announces the death of the man who prosecuted cult-leader and assassin Charles Manson, and later became a crime writer, Vincent Bugliosi. He was 80.
A third is the less-well-known Vincent Musetto, a retired New York Post headline writer, one who was best remembered for HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR. The story was of a grisly crime on April 13, 1983, involving decapitation. Musetto died at 74.
If I follow far less famously in their footsteps, I can expect to live 11, 17 or, less likely, 33 more years.
All of which brings me to a gospel passage pointed out to me recently. It contains what in earlier stages of life I might not have considered a remarkable pearl of wisdom, but today, thinking of life and death as proximate things, it does.
The evangelist John puts in the risen Jesus' mouth the following words, addressed to the apostle Peter:
Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go. (John 21:18)I already experience hearing loss and my eyes require more help from my glasses than they used to in the past. Someone this weekend reminded me that in retirement I may be less mobile than I am now. Then, toward the end, a hand will take me further where I have no desire to go, because I can't imagine it. Living is all I know.
I am comforted, I don't quite know why, just knowing that this is all in the natural order of things. It need not involve decapitation, nor adversary action in the legal system nor require of me a lasting burst of graphic creativity. I will just be carried there.
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Stop the presses ... reaching the end of life is unpleasant
Dying is not, I hope, such a big deal if you are not sick. (Knock on wood!) But nearing the end of your productive life without having been President of the United States or won a Nobel Prize or even have some modest recognition, makes one wonder what it was all for.
If you're a guy and you had a traditional marriage (that has fallen apart), whatever great deeds of your kids are really, at most, influenced by your wife. You were just putting a roof over your family and bringing home the bacon. Not luxuriously.
If you have worked in in a certain field nearly 30 years it's galling when people ask you if you work with an employee of yours.
If you ended up in an obscure field so obscure that people will tell you to your face "that's boring." That's disappointing.
You're 60-something and you have nothing to show for anything you did.
And, of course, there are resentful people who hate you or envy you or are just mean to you. Some of it deserved, no doubt.
What was it all for? Why doesn't it just end, already?
If you're a guy and you had a traditional marriage (that has fallen apart), whatever great deeds of your kids are really, at most, influenced by your wife. You were just putting a roof over your family and bringing home the bacon. Not luxuriously.
If you have worked in in a certain field nearly 30 years it's galling when people ask you if you work with an employee of yours.
If you ended up in an obscure field so obscure that people will tell you to your face "that's boring." That's disappointing.
You're 60-something and you have nothing to show for anything you did.
And, of course, there are resentful people who hate you or envy you or are just mean to you. Some of it deserved, no doubt.
What was it all for? Why doesn't it just end, already?
Friday, August 10, 2012
Nature helps us "Grow Down"
The beauty of growing down is how Nature prepares to take us back into her bosom. The world becomes muffled and quieter, voices more garbled, television's volume is never high enough. Faces lose wrinkles along with their sharp edges and I am always zooming in on text in my browser.
Slowly, the angry horns of fellow drivers fade away as do the ridiculous, and at heart trivial, questions and demands of petty bureaucrats, such as police officers, nurses and the whole army of factotums who work off scripts and protocols devised by and for morons. Never mind.
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune stop at the cozy barrier of progressively weaker connections. Mental acuity and memory recedes to when we loved playgrounds and each day was a whole new lifetime. Tell me again what was it that called attention to what's between my legs?
Soon we are only breathing, uninterested in food or the newspaper. Until we no longer care to breathe.
Slowly, the angry horns of fellow drivers fade away as do the ridiculous, and at heart trivial, questions and demands of petty bureaucrats, such as police officers, nurses and the whole army of factotums who work off scripts and protocols devised by and for morons. Never mind.
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune stop at the cozy barrier of progressively weaker connections. Mental acuity and memory recedes to when we loved playgrounds and each day was a whole new lifetime. Tell me again what was it that called attention to what's between my legs?
Soon we are only breathing, uninterested in food or the newspaper. Until we no longer care to breathe.
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
This is the first day of the rest of my life
No, really, it is.
In the 1999 film "American Beauty," Lester Burnham (played by Kevin Spacey) says: "Remember those posters that said, 'Today is the first day of the rest of your life'? Well, that's true of every day but one: the day you die."
This is the day I did not die.
This is the first day that the ghost of the past no longer hovers over me. Oh, I have a past, don't get me wrong. It's just that some really awful things in it no longer have a hold on me.
I feel like shouting in the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Free at last!
In the 1999 film "American Beauty," Lester Burnham (played by Kevin Spacey) says: "Remember those posters that said, 'Today is the first day of the rest of your life'? Well, that's true of every day but one: the day you die."
This is the day I did not die.
This is the first day that the ghost of the past no longer hovers over me. Oh, I have a past, don't get me wrong. It's just that some really awful things in it no longer have a hold on me.
I feel like shouting in the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Free at last!
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
"Death Day" was 31 years ago
I remember it clearly. I was sleeping in southern California. I'd been to a farmworker camp the day before and planned to discuss
my moving experience with my father when I got back to Washington. Persistent ringing. Who in hell ...? It's 6:30 am! I was awake.
I had to go to the rectory ASAP. I was staying at a church facility in San Bernardino. Only nuns and priests would call me out of my slumber at six-effing-thirty. I was told to call home.
No answer. My wife was pregnant: had anything gone wrong? Because "wrong" was beginning to be the word rising up in my mind. Something was ... um ... askew. But it was six-effing-thirty, maybe 6:45 by then.
Called my mother-in-law. "Your father is dead."
The priest and a nun were looking at me as my face crumpled and I set down the phone. Everyone seemed to be speaking to me at once and I just ran out of the building and out to an avenue and lit a cigarette.
Nobody walks on sidewalks in California. Certainly not that early in the morning.
I returned, let me be sleepwalked to the airport and to an all-day cross-country odyssey to ... what? To confront the debris of my father's life, ended at 59 years of age and nearly 10 months. Five months older than my age today, 31 years later.
I had to go to the rectory ASAP. I was staying at a church facility in San Bernardino. Only nuns and priests would call me out of my slumber at six-effing-thirty. I was told to call home.
No answer. My wife was pregnant: had anything gone wrong? Because "wrong" was beginning to be the word rising up in my mind. Something was ... um ... askew. But it was six-effing-thirty, maybe 6:45 by then.
Called my mother-in-law. "Your father is dead."
The priest and a nun were looking at me as my face crumpled and I set down the phone. Everyone seemed to be speaking to me at once and I just ran out of the building and out to an avenue and lit a cigarette.
Nobody walks on sidewalks in California. Certainly not that early in the morning.
I returned, let me be sleepwalked to the airport and to an all-day cross-country odyssey to ... what? To confront the debris of my father's life, ended at 59 years of age and nearly 10 months. Five months older than my age today, 31 years later.
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Death Month
(This is a repost for the benefit of the people involved.)
For two sisters I know who live together, and their third sibling far away, today is what they regard as the second "Death Day" in less than a month. August brings anniversaries of the death of both their parents.
Other people they know have died this month, but nothing quite tops the loss of a father in childhood. A father who by all accounts was an older man besotted with the daughters of his senectitude, yet a strong-willed pater familias with ideas of yesteryear that would have clashed with these children's in a matter of a few years.
The young woman he'd met as a spy in World War II -- true story! -- was left to spend nearly half a century on her own; well provided, yet surely bereft as she raised three daughters. Decades later she still referred to herself as Mrs. X, rather than by her own given first and family names.
He died what must have been an excruciating struggle with cancer a few decades earlier than the actuarial expectations would have led anyone to expect. She died at a ripe old age, in her sleep.
They were both individuals whose lives, and the artifacts of their lives, with which I became acquainted long after the heyday of either one, bespoke a manner of abiding seemingly now gone. People of few spoken emotions, of thorough learning received and augmented as a given, lucky enough to be born to see the fruits of their labors pay off handsomely.
They were people of distinction, yet also rebels. She was a mother and housewife with a then-rare graduate degree designed to fulfill her unrealized ambition to run worldwide cartels. (I recounted her interment here.) He was that unusual businessman with a love of Dante Alighieri.
After people have lived long enough, there are always death days throughout the year; dates that remind us of people long gone.
In my mother's childhood it had been December, for her older sister, whose teenage death had put an entire household in mourning. For me it was November for years, the month my father died; that is, until my mother died on a date that was, only a few years after her passing, destined to become famous -- September 11.
Now I have photographs in which everyone portrayed is now dead. People I knew, people whose jokes still resonate from the picture as if they were still speaking.
I suspect that is what the two sisters will recall: their parents in their light summer clothes having evening drinks by the lake beside their home; he tossing witticisms, she laughing gently and her laughter rippling across the water.
For two sisters I know who live together, and their third sibling far away, today is what they regard as the second "Death Day" in less than a month. August brings anniversaries of the death of both their parents.
Other people they know have died this month, but nothing quite tops the loss of a father in childhood. A father who by all accounts was an older man besotted with the daughters of his senectitude, yet a strong-willed pater familias with ideas of yesteryear that would have clashed with these children's in a matter of a few years.
The young woman he'd met as a spy in World War II -- true story! -- was left to spend nearly half a century on her own; well provided, yet surely bereft as she raised three daughters. Decades later she still referred to herself as Mrs. X, rather than by her own given first and family names.
He died what must have been an excruciating struggle with cancer a few decades earlier than the actuarial expectations would have led anyone to expect. She died at a ripe old age, in her sleep.
They were both individuals whose lives, and the artifacts of their lives, with which I became acquainted long after the heyday of either one, bespoke a manner of abiding seemingly now gone. People of few spoken emotions, of thorough learning received and augmented as a given, lucky enough to be born to see the fruits of their labors pay off handsomely.
They were people of distinction, yet also rebels. She was a mother and housewife with a then-rare graduate degree designed to fulfill her unrealized ambition to run worldwide cartels. (I recounted her interment here.) He was that unusual businessman with a love of Dante Alighieri.
After people have lived long enough, there are always death days throughout the year; dates that remind us of people long gone.
In my mother's childhood it had been December, for her older sister, whose teenage death had put an entire household in mourning. For me it was November for years, the month my father died; that is, until my mother died on a date that was, only a few years after her passing, destined to become famous -- September 11.
Now I have photographs in which everyone portrayed is now dead. People I knew, people whose jokes still resonate from the picture as if they were still speaking.
I suspect that is what the two sisters will recall: their parents in their light summer clothes having evening drinks by the lake beside their home; he tossing witticisms, she laughing gently and her laughter rippling across the water.
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
"I Don't Want to Die"
What's with the near-obsessive repetition of this shriek of terror? It's ubiquitous. And silly.
‘Mommy, I don’t want to die. I love you,’ was the alleged plea of Louisiana nine-year-old Camille Hebert before her mother stabbed her to death.
"I Don't Want to Die of a Heart Attack When I'm 25," proclaims the title of a dieting blog.
"I don't want to die, ever," comments an anonymous blog reader in response to the post of a 95-year-old who proclaims his desire to live.
Why not die?
Were any of these people composing an immortal symphony when the thought of death came to them? On the verge of curing cancer? About to sign a treaty abolishing torture, nuclear weapons and poverty forever?
Did they think they were alone in this? By the time I started writing this, about 61,900 people had died this day on the planet.*
Life's a bitch and then you die. My preferred version of this urban saying is "life's a bitch and then you marry one." The image makes a better allegory. Life does treat us roughly and we are pretty much stuck with it, like it or not. The only divorce available is death.
So why prolong it? Are we all so rich, so healthy, so overwhelmingly happy, so virtuous that living is, itself, a philosophical good or a psychosomatic pleasure?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not proposing that we all engage in mass suicide. (The environment will take care of that, if nuclear weapons don't.) I'm just wondering if we can all just look at death in the face and behave with some semblance of dignity.
I am dying. I will die. All of us are dying from the minute we're born. At some moment in the future that we don't know, we will all be dead. Probably forgotten not long after. Our bodies will turn to dust.
So?
When I was a believer in God I thought, of course, that there was something else on the other side. Some people do everything here thinking of that other side: they are "good" to avoid "hell." I didn't particularly care: I thought being good was worthy in itself, or being bad sounded like more fun at the time.
Now I doubt there's anything at the other side of death, at least not much more than there is on this side -- which is to say, not much at all. Cosmically, we are smaller than microscopic; in terms of the span of time in which we can estimate events to have occurred, our lives are shorter than seconds.
What's so important, precious, significant, worth defending about our particular lives?
Die. Die with some self-respect, not like a quivering fool.
* Note: as I was putting the finishing touches on this post the number of deaths today stood at more than 66,800. To paraphrase the movie disclaimer: 3,900 people have died during the writing of this post. Now there's a number that is more fitting. That would likely wipe out everyone I have ever known.
‘Mommy, I don’t want to die. I love you,’ was the alleged plea of Louisiana nine-year-old Camille Hebert before her mother stabbed her to death.
"I Don't Want to Die of a Heart Attack When I'm 25," proclaims the title of a dieting blog.
"I don't want to die, ever," comments an anonymous blog reader in response to the post of a 95-year-old who proclaims his desire to live.
Why not die?
Were any of these people composing an immortal symphony when the thought of death came to them? On the verge of curing cancer? About to sign a treaty abolishing torture, nuclear weapons and poverty forever?
Did they think they were alone in this? By the time I started writing this, about 61,900 people had died this day on the planet.*
Life's a bitch and then you die. My preferred version of this urban saying is "life's a bitch and then you marry one." The image makes a better allegory. Life does treat us roughly and we are pretty much stuck with it, like it or not. The only divorce available is death.
So why prolong it? Are we all so rich, so healthy, so overwhelmingly happy, so virtuous that living is, itself, a philosophical good or a psychosomatic pleasure?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not proposing that we all engage in mass suicide. (The environment will take care of that, if nuclear weapons don't.) I'm just wondering if we can all just look at death in the face and behave with some semblance of dignity.
I am dying. I will die. All of us are dying from the minute we're born. At some moment in the future that we don't know, we will all be dead. Probably forgotten not long after. Our bodies will turn to dust.
So?
When I was a believer in God I thought, of course, that there was something else on the other side. Some people do everything here thinking of that other side: they are "good" to avoid "hell." I didn't particularly care: I thought being good was worthy in itself, or being bad sounded like more fun at the time.
Now I doubt there's anything at the other side of death, at least not much more than there is on this side -- which is to say, not much at all. Cosmically, we are smaller than microscopic; in terms of the span of time in which we can estimate events to have occurred, our lives are shorter than seconds.
What's so important, precious, significant, worth defending about our particular lives?
Die. Die with some self-respect, not like a quivering fool.
* Note: as I was putting the finishing touches on this post the number of deaths today stood at more than 66,800. To paraphrase the movie disclaimer: 3,900 people have died during the writing of this post. Now there's a number that is more fitting. That would likely wipe out everyone I have ever known.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Speculator Dies, Gets Canonized
Abe Pollin may not get a Rot In Hell Award, but that's because he's too insignificant to deserve hell. Purgatory will do. In any case, what's with stiletto sharp columnist Maureen Dowd of the New York Times canonizing a guy whose life was essentially devoted to real estate speculation?
He owned a basketball team -- because he was rich. He invested lots of money in downtown Washington, D.C. -- because he was rich. He started, too late to live to see it, an "affordable housing" project in the Third World section of Washington, D.C. -- because it assuaged his conscience concerning how he got rich.
As Balzac wrote, behind every fortune there is a crime. I haven't investigated into the details of Pollin's particular crimes, but I'm sure nothing of what he did was charity. He had fun being a basketball owner, he got his money back and then some from his "courageous investing," that's why it's called investment.
Oh, and after making millions for how many decades in the Washington area, did he decide to set aside a portion of the land he bought, on speculation, in Southeast Washington, where health, wealth and well-being indicators are closer to most developing failed states than the USA. And what tax breaks did he get from the deal?
The land in Southeast has been cheap for years while Pollin and his friends were buying it up in expectation of the planned development that a baseball stadium near the area would bring. With the best politicians money can buy, the land he bought for chump change is becoming quite valuable.
So, excuse me, but Abe Pollin was no saint. He was merely a speculator who got rich. I'm so tired of the hagiographies of shameless name-dropping sycophants such as Dowd.
He owned a basketball team -- because he was rich. He invested lots of money in downtown Washington, D.C. -- because he was rich. He started, too late to live to see it, an "affordable housing" project in the Third World section of Washington, D.C. -- because it assuaged his conscience concerning how he got rich.
As Balzac wrote, behind every fortune there is a crime. I haven't investigated into the details of Pollin's particular crimes, but I'm sure nothing of what he did was charity. He had fun being a basketball owner, he got his money back and then some from his "courageous investing," that's why it's called investment.
Oh, and after making millions for how many decades in the Washington area, did he decide to set aside a portion of the land he bought, on speculation, in Southeast Washington, where health, wealth and well-being indicators are closer to most developing failed states than the USA. And what tax breaks did he get from the deal?
The land in Southeast has been cheap for years while Pollin and his friends were buying it up in expectation of the planned development that a baseball stadium near the area would bring. With the best politicians money can buy, the land he bought for chump change is becoming quite valuable.
So, excuse me, but Abe Pollin was no saint. He was merely a speculator who got rich. I'm so tired of the hagiographies of shameless name-dropping sycophants such as Dowd.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Fast Eddie Kicks the Bucket
Faster than you can say "Chappaquiddick," President Obama has called the newly dead Edward M. Kennedy "the greatest United States Senator of our time.” I stood silent during the absurd, post-mortem lionization of Michael Jackson and fond memories of fluffed hair queen Farrah Fawcett. But I won't stand for the second Kennedy apotheosis in a month -- this one completely undeserved.
I am not a Kennedy hater and I agree with most of the positions adopted by the dead senator. I revered Jack and Bobby. But Teddy, whose life amply demonstrates he should have been nicknamed Fast Eddie, was unquestionably the "bad seed."
Unlike Eunice Kennedy Shriver, kindly rich lady that she was, her brother Edward disappointed only those who expected him to deliver at least as much as he received. After all, Ted Kennedy was born with a silver spoon and delivered a life of dishonest posturing. Then again, that silver spoon had been forged from the Wall Street and Prohibition Era shenanigans of his none-too-saintly father.
The storied double dealing of patriarch Joe Kennedy wasn't Ted Kennedy's fault. Not like his cheating on a Spanish exam at Harvard. Not like Chappaquiddick.
The man now being eulogized as a great liberal allowed the minimum wage to sink below the poverty line. He failed to join forces with Jimmy Carter to prevent the election of Ronald Reagan and to help pass health reform in the 1990s.
Kennedy claimed to be a Catholic, yet after driving a good woman to drink and divorce, he emulated the darkest side of Camelot, finally squiring another divorced Catholic.
Is there anything for which Edward M. Kennedy said he stood that he didn't betray? Is there anything he actually achieved?
I am not a Kennedy hater and I agree with most of the positions adopted by the dead senator. I revered Jack and Bobby. But Teddy, whose life amply demonstrates he should have been nicknamed Fast Eddie, was unquestionably the "bad seed."
Unlike Eunice Kennedy Shriver, kindly rich lady that she was, her brother Edward disappointed only those who expected him to deliver at least as much as he received. After all, Ted Kennedy was born with a silver spoon and delivered a life of dishonest posturing. Then again, that silver spoon had been forged from the Wall Street and Prohibition Era shenanigans of his none-too-saintly father.
The storied double dealing of patriarch Joe Kennedy wasn't Ted Kennedy's fault. Not like his cheating on a Spanish exam at Harvard. Not like Chappaquiddick.
The man now being eulogized as a great liberal allowed the minimum wage to sink below the poverty line. He failed to join forces with Jimmy Carter to prevent the election of Ronald Reagan and to help pass health reform in the 1990s.
Kennedy claimed to be a Catholic, yet after driving a good woman to drink and divorce, he emulated the darkest side of Camelot, finally squiring another divorced Catholic.
Is there anything for which Edward M. Kennedy said he stood that he didn't betray? Is there anything he actually achieved?
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Three Deaths
George, Lew, my father. Two generational contemporaries dead within days, one dead almost 30 years ago recalled by fluke in the same week.
George was a humorous cyberfriend I never met in the flesh, but I had a good sense of his character.
Lew would not have died in the arms of his wife if I had not told him, years ago, that she planned to dump him as a boyfriend. And if he had not redoubled his campaign to win her heart.
My father's death was a tragedy for the personal mess he left in his wake, but it's a psychic mess I had long ago cleaned up until I ran into someone who asked me if I had heard of a man by the same name ... my father, by the details.
Then there's my own death, of which I have dreamed. I dreamed of everyone carrying on just fine without me. (Drat!) No funeral cortege to Arlington, no heads of state flying in. Nothing. Just another nobody gone.
Death talk is unfashionable in this society, in which we proclaim the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet death is a reality of life. Closer when those not far from one's own age begin to die.
Now you know why I haven't posted anything. I was thinking about death.
George was a humorous cyberfriend I never met in the flesh, but I had a good sense of his character.
Lew would not have died in the arms of his wife if I had not told him, years ago, that she planned to dump him as a boyfriend. And if he had not redoubled his campaign to win her heart.
My father's death was a tragedy for the personal mess he left in his wake, but it's a psychic mess I had long ago cleaned up until I ran into someone who asked me if I had heard of a man by the same name ... my father, by the details.
Then there's my own death, of which I have dreamed. I dreamed of everyone carrying on just fine without me. (Drat!) No funeral cortege to Arlington, no heads of state flying in. Nothing. Just another nobody gone.
Death talk is unfashionable in this society, in which we proclaim the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet death is a reality of life. Closer when those not far from one's own age begin to die.
Now you know why I haven't posted anything. I was thinking about death.
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Snowball in April
A friend suggested that it would begin to happen more frequently now. My parents died more than a decade ago and surely they would have been dead by now if they hadn't. A very close friend's older sister just died. Now a school classmate has cancer and is undergoing chemo.
For the first time in my life, I'm older than the president. My father died "young" and I will soon be older than he was at the time. Then what?
I've been at the top of the hill for a while now and I'm beginning to feel that that plateau in which one is at one's prime is running out. All I can say is that I wish myself and my contemporaries a swift and painless death, whenever it comes.
For the first time in my life, I'm older than the president. My father died "young" and I will soon be older than he was at the time. Then what?
I've been at the top of the hill for a while now and I'm beginning to feel that that plateau in which one is at one's prime is running out. All I can say is that I wish myself and my contemporaries a swift and painless death, whenever it comes.
Monday, November 17, 2008
The Blog Post of Laughter and Forgetting
As I forget my identification at home, or my wallet, or my head when it is not attached, I am reminded of the title of Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting. It occurs to me that we Boomers are entering a stage in which the Orwellian destruction of memory against which Kundera protests is inevitable.
I was always an absent-minded professor, someone who has known me since my 20s reminds me. Even I recall that I always fought against my forgetting and perennial messiness, with decidedly mixed results.
So?
About a decade ago my printer's rep died and what his colleagues most remembered with laughter was his tendency to forget to turn off his cell phone before a meeting. That was when cellular phones were new.
As I near the completion of the second edition of a family history on which I have been laboring almost all my life, it occurred to me that I didn't scan in pictures at the optimum resolution. Thank goodness I kept the photos rather than discarding them. Some grandchild will have to scan them more accurately in using the precursor of 22nd century technology.
For myself, I'm done as soon as the editing, writing and layout is finished. There are a number of projects that I now begin to realize I am unlikely ever to complete to my satisfaction.
Similarly, there are a number of achievements I will never attain. I won't grow up to be President of the United States nor managing editor of The New York Times.
So? Can't I simply laugh it off and forget these silly yearnings? Kundera wrote with a similar irony of the air-brushing-out in official photos of politicians purged from the Czech Communist Party.
Granted, in Soviet forced forgetting there was a tacit and symbolic death brought about that Kundera understandably rebelled against. Death by murder always feels like a violation.
Yet doesn't nature murder us all? Don't I face an explicit and actual death?
Oddly enough, I become less rebellious against my murder by nature's hand with every day that passes. I am getting old enough to laugh at it, to gain an indifference to whether it occurs next week or 30 years from now.
It is almost as if life has excised a bad tooth and given me laughing gas to avoid the pain.
Having lived in a dictatorship with relative everyday ease, I wonder now whether living in a totalitarian regime was all that different from the dictatorship of nature: laughter and forgetting to ease whatever ails us, instead of the futile struggle to remember.
Soviets were paying rent at 1920s rates in the 1990s. Sure, the ruble wasn't a freely convertible currency, but I doubt it made a difference for the majority of Russians. Would it have changed things that much in America?
As one who lives and breathes politics, it might be difficult to forgo certain kind of arguments in cafes or on the Internet, but in the end, have I ever really solved any social problem with my discussions?
Most people want a few simple things. A full belly, some affection or facsimile thereof, clothes appropriate to the season, a decent place to live, something to keep us occupied. Oh, and something to complain about.
Was there a richer, more compassionate humor anywhere outside of Soviet Russia in our lifetime? Remember "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us"? I doubt there was anything like it amid the stationwagons and color TV sets of Levittown.
Sure, I could to without the wanton murder of some 30 million people under Stalin. But even people who lived through the Red Terror are wistful about it today.
In the end, it is all laughter and forgetting.
I was always an absent-minded professor, someone who has known me since my 20s reminds me. Even I recall that I always fought against my forgetting and perennial messiness, with decidedly mixed results.
So?
About a decade ago my printer's rep died and what his colleagues most remembered with laughter was his tendency to forget to turn off his cell phone before a meeting. That was when cellular phones were new.
As I near the completion of the second edition of a family history on which I have been laboring almost all my life, it occurred to me that I didn't scan in pictures at the optimum resolution. Thank goodness I kept the photos rather than discarding them. Some grandchild will have to scan them more accurately in using the precursor of 22nd century technology.
For myself, I'm done as soon as the editing, writing and layout is finished. There are a number of projects that I now begin to realize I am unlikely ever to complete to my satisfaction.
Similarly, there are a number of achievements I will never attain. I won't grow up to be President of the United States nor managing editor of The New York Times.
So? Can't I simply laugh it off and forget these silly yearnings? Kundera wrote with a similar irony of the air-brushing-out in official photos of politicians purged from the Czech Communist Party.
Granted, in Soviet forced forgetting there was a tacit and symbolic death brought about that Kundera understandably rebelled against. Death by murder always feels like a violation.
Yet doesn't nature murder us all? Don't I face an explicit and actual death?
Oddly enough, I become less rebellious against my murder by nature's hand with every day that passes. I am getting old enough to laugh at it, to gain an indifference to whether it occurs next week or 30 years from now.
It is almost as if life has excised a bad tooth and given me laughing gas to avoid the pain.
Having lived in a dictatorship with relative everyday ease, I wonder now whether living in a totalitarian regime was all that different from the dictatorship of nature: laughter and forgetting to ease whatever ails us, instead of the futile struggle to remember.
Soviets were paying rent at 1920s rates in the 1990s. Sure, the ruble wasn't a freely convertible currency, but I doubt it made a difference for the majority of Russians. Would it have changed things that much in America?
As one who lives and breathes politics, it might be difficult to forgo certain kind of arguments in cafes or on the Internet, but in the end, have I ever really solved any social problem with my discussions?
Most people want a few simple things. A full belly, some affection or facsimile thereof, clothes appropriate to the season, a decent place to live, something to keep us occupied. Oh, and something to complain about.
Was there a richer, more compassionate humor anywhere outside of Soviet Russia in our lifetime? Remember "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us"? I doubt there was anything like it amid the stationwagons and color TV sets of Levittown.
Sure, I could to without the wanton murder of some 30 million people under Stalin. But even people who lived through the Red Terror are wistful about it today.
In the end, it is all laughter and forgetting.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Death as a Way of Life
Having anticipated spending the weekend engaged in tea-leaf reading with harbingers of Mr. Death, I was surprised to discover instead living as a way of dying, in a way that applies to all of us. We treat death as Benjamin Franklin's joke, something unpleasant and unmentionable, rather than as the useful nudge to live, just as taxes are a necessary means to share.
Perhaps it helps that I am a mere four years away from the age at which my father died, although I am a comfortable 35 years from my father's father's age of demise.
My father died "young," or so his contemporaries said. I was just about to become a father for the first time and my middle-aged father did not seem young at all. Now it he seems to have been too young to go; at nearly his age of death, I still have some living in me. I think.
My grandfather, on the other hand, voluntarily decided not to undergo a third operation that might -- or might not -- have extended his life an uncertain span of time. He knew it was his time to die and given his advanced age nearly everyone, save for those of us who loved him and still miss him, would agree.
Most people I have known who were aware of death's impending arrival at old age were ready, almost anxious for it come, to be done with physical decline and pain, to end resistance to nature's course. This past weekend, however, I came across what seemed to me an entirely new, Zen-like approach.
A sick person within range of a reasonable age for a man to die -- no matter how unreasoning death will always feel to those who have loved him -- had given his family, and perhaps himself, a few scares. The fear and shock was perhaps enough that he seemed to embrace his fate -- one that's not imminent, yet feels closer than the demise of his youngest child -- with a joy and matter-of-fact calm that seemed to imbue his household with a way of living that is very much in the moment.
Because I am closer in age to the person who is ill than I am to my grandfather's age of death, the picture I took in seemed a reality not to be ignored: this is more or less how I will be when I get closer to my turn.
Then I was struck by how the healthier living, those whose dying seemed likely to stretch out for decades beyond even my time, were living day to day, even with an awareness of Mr. Death they had not had before.
There were tears and laughter and worry, of course, but fundamentally, as a grounding of all that was going on there was an air of letting go, of living to the fullest in tiny ways, of a normalcy that might have seemed unnatural were it not so wise.
Why not? We are all dying. If only we were more forcefully aware of it!
I could walk out and get hit by the proverbial truck. I might have a deadly disease incubating in me as I write. My body might just tire out inexplicably one night.
Am I ready for that? Have I let go of my resentments and angers and worries and fears, my navel gazing and self-pity, to replace them with a serious but not humorless sense of purpose and focus on the things that, to the best of my knowledge, are important?
It seemed, and perhaps I idealize, that the household of the man I went to see was trying to let go and live. Or rather, to take on dying as a way of life.
If I were on my deathbed -- or my death computer chair -- that is how I would like life around me to be. Indeed, I am in death computer chair and I feel a greater urgency to focus on what is important.
Excuse me, then, I have to go do some work.
Perhaps it helps that I am a mere four years away from the age at which my father died, although I am a comfortable 35 years from my father's father's age of demise.
My father died "young," or so his contemporaries said. I was just about to become a father for the first time and my middle-aged father did not seem young at all. Now it he seems to have been too young to go; at nearly his age of death, I still have some living in me. I think.
My grandfather, on the other hand, voluntarily decided not to undergo a third operation that might -- or might not -- have extended his life an uncertain span of time. He knew it was his time to die and given his advanced age nearly everyone, save for those of us who loved him and still miss him, would agree.
Most people I have known who were aware of death's impending arrival at old age were ready, almost anxious for it come, to be done with physical decline and pain, to end resistance to nature's course. This past weekend, however, I came across what seemed to me an entirely new, Zen-like approach.
A sick person within range of a reasonable age for a man to die -- no matter how unreasoning death will always feel to those who have loved him -- had given his family, and perhaps himself, a few scares. The fear and shock was perhaps enough that he seemed to embrace his fate -- one that's not imminent, yet feels closer than the demise of his youngest child -- with a joy and matter-of-fact calm that seemed to imbue his household with a way of living that is very much in the moment.
Because I am closer in age to the person who is ill than I am to my grandfather's age of death, the picture I took in seemed a reality not to be ignored: this is more or less how I will be when I get closer to my turn.
Then I was struck by how the healthier living, those whose dying seemed likely to stretch out for decades beyond even my time, were living day to day, even with an awareness of Mr. Death they had not had before.
There were tears and laughter and worry, of course, but fundamentally, as a grounding of all that was going on there was an air of letting go, of living to the fullest in tiny ways, of a normalcy that might have seemed unnatural were it not so wise.
Why not? We are all dying. If only we were more forcefully aware of it!
I could walk out and get hit by the proverbial truck. I might have a deadly disease incubating in me as I write. My body might just tire out inexplicably one night.
Am I ready for that? Have I let go of my resentments and angers and worries and fears, my navel gazing and self-pity, to replace them with a serious but not humorless sense of purpose and focus on the things that, to the best of my knowledge, are important?
It seemed, and perhaps I idealize, that the household of the man I went to see was trying to let go and live. Or rather, to take on dying as a way of life.
If I were on my deathbed -- or my death computer chair -- that is how I would like life around me to be. Indeed, I am in death computer chair and I feel a greater urgency to focus on what is important.
Excuse me, then, I have to go do some work.
Friday, August 25, 2006
Drafting One's Own Obituary
In the annual four-week retreat prescribed for all Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola proposed that the first week be devoted to contemplation of the consequences of sin, including one's prospects after death. This came to mind to me as I began drafting my obituary.
What first will strike you, if you try it, is that you don't know when it will happen. You can't put at what age you died, or where, or what the cause of death was. Obvious, maybe, but try thinking of it.
Will you die at 59 as your father did, or at 90 as your grandfather? Will it be in your sleep or will your body be strapped to a dozen machines in some antiseptic room? Will it be near the familiar neighborhood in which you spent most of your life, or even perhaps where you grew up, or will it happen far, far away?
The second great unknown, particularly if you are famous only at your home dinner table, is what you might be noted for at the end of your life.
Will you be known for the job you held for 20-odd years? For some silly phrase you don't even know about? What if your most decisive act hasn't happened yet? Will you make some discovery, climb some mountain, achieve something that adds to the knowledge or collective experience of humankind in some mildly unique way of which you have yet to conceive?
For the better part of three decades I've written in inverted-pyramid style. The most important and foundational facts come first, then the details. It's classic news style.
But if you don't know the most important fact, then the hook of the whole story is missing.
If between now and the day you die you cure cancer, which you haven't a clue how to do today, whatever obit you draft today is useless. Granted, if you do discover a cure for cancer, every newspaper in the world will pay the best wordsmiths to eulogize and obituarize you.
For the more likely scenario, writing your own obituary is impossible. At best you can draft it, suggesting facts to be added by someone else.
But here's what strikes me as a third insight. Provided you are not bed-ridden (although Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Kidnapped! in bed), it is still possible to decide to bring about the fact or facts you would like to see in your obituary.
You still have a chance, one that day by day diminishes, to shoot for that obituary hoop. It's not a slam dunk in most instances.
Speaking for myself, I am highly unlikely to become President of the United States (although I do note that I am a -- corporate -- president in the United States). Cancer cure was already noted. No Olympic medal seems in my future.
Indeed, at my age, it is most likely that I have done everything of note that I will ever do.
Most people would refer to me as middle-aged, although it's not exactly certain that I have reached the chronological midpoint of my life. The oldest person alive I could find is María Capovilla of Ecuador, born on September 14, 1889, which at this writing makes her 116. By that standard, I still have a few years to go to the midpoint.
Of course, the actuarial odds are against me: women live longer than men. In any case, I can't imagine that I will have the capacity to write the Great American Novel in the next 20 years, especially since I haven't had it in the very much more vital 20 years past.
You might be younger, have a broader shot. My one warning: this game of life is played faster than you think.
The only thing you or I may be able to alter at this point is our private obituary. That's the obituary written in the hearts of those who knew us.
A few (how many?) will not mourn me at all, but actually rejoice. A few others may suddenly recall my name and wonder that I wasn't dead already. Many will never find out that I have died.
The hardy few who endured knowing me or those who, like my sons, can't avoid me, what will their obituary say?
What first will strike you, if you try it, is that you don't know when it will happen. You can't put at what age you died, or where, or what the cause of death was. Obvious, maybe, but try thinking of it.
Will you die at 59 as your father did, or at 90 as your grandfather? Will it be in your sleep or will your body be strapped to a dozen machines in some antiseptic room? Will it be near the familiar neighborhood in which you spent most of your life, or even perhaps where you grew up, or will it happen far, far away?
The second great unknown, particularly if you are famous only at your home dinner table, is what you might be noted for at the end of your life.
Will you be known for the job you held for 20-odd years? For some silly phrase you don't even know about? What if your most decisive act hasn't happened yet? Will you make some discovery, climb some mountain, achieve something that adds to the knowledge or collective experience of humankind in some mildly unique way of which you have yet to conceive?
For the better part of three decades I've written in inverted-pyramid style. The most important and foundational facts come first, then the details. It's classic news style.
But if you don't know the most important fact, then the hook of the whole story is missing.
If between now and the day you die you cure cancer, which you haven't a clue how to do today, whatever obit you draft today is useless. Granted, if you do discover a cure for cancer, every newspaper in the world will pay the best wordsmiths to eulogize and obituarize you.
For the more likely scenario, writing your own obituary is impossible. At best you can draft it, suggesting facts to be added by someone else.
But here's what strikes me as a third insight. Provided you are not bed-ridden (although Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Kidnapped! in bed), it is still possible to decide to bring about the fact or facts you would like to see in your obituary.
You still have a chance, one that day by day diminishes, to shoot for that obituary hoop. It's not a slam dunk in most instances.
Speaking for myself, I am highly unlikely to become President of the United States (although I do note that I am a -- corporate -- president in the United States). Cancer cure was already noted. No Olympic medal seems in my future.
Indeed, at my age, it is most likely that I have done everything of note that I will ever do.
Most people would refer to me as middle-aged, although it's not exactly certain that I have reached the chronological midpoint of my life. The oldest person alive I could find is María Capovilla of Ecuador, born on September 14, 1889, which at this writing makes her 116. By that standard, I still have a few years to go to the midpoint.
Of course, the actuarial odds are against me: women live longer than men. In any case, I can't imagine that I will have the capacity to write the Great American Novel in the next 20 years, especially since I haven't had it in the very much more vital 20 years past.
You might be younger, have a broader shot. My one warning: this game of life is played faster than you think.
The only thing you or I may be able to alter at this point is our private obituary. That's the obituary written in the hearts of those who knew us.
A few (how many?) will not mourn me at all, but actually rejoice. A few others may suddenly recall my name and wonder that I wasn't dead already. Many will never find out that I have died.
The hardy few who endured knowing me or those who, like my sons, can't avoid me, what will their obituary say?
Saturday, July 22, 2006
A Grateful Nation
Few things fix the mind on the here and the hereafter -- and the way human beings consign others to ford the pass between them -- than a funeral with full military honors at Arlington Cemetery, such as one I had the occasion to attend this week.
In almost every respect, the occasion was uncommon. The family party was small. The wound caused by the nearly year-old death was almost healed. The death itself had come peacefully in the deceased's bed at home. The veteran was a female naval intelligence officer during World War II.
More than a funeral, it was an inhumation. There was no bathos, nor rage at the loss of a loved one at the hands of a negligent, selfish president waging a criminally stupid war in the Persian Gulf. World War II was indisputably the last "good war."
Instead, there was an astounding display of quiet dignity on the part of the U.S. Navy. A marching band, what looked to my civilian eye as a battallion of sailors, a horse-drawn caisson with a casket draped in the stars and stripes, a color guard.
I was reminded of Kennedy's funeral. My older son thought it was someone else's cortege, not his grandmother's. Perhaps Rumsfeld's (I only wish!). It was beautiful.
The band played "Come, Holy Ghost." Then we processed to the burial site to the sounds of the Navy hymn, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save." We stopped. Six sailors held a flag over the cremains. The Navy chaplain led us in prayer. We stood.
A line of about six sailors formed, raised their rifles and fired a three-rifle volley. The practice has its origins in an ancient war custom of bringing all fighting to a halt to remove the dead from the battlefield. Once each army had cleared its dead, it would fire three volleys to indicate that the dead had been cared for and that they were ready to go back to the fight.
Finally, the six escorting sailors folded the flag to the sounds of "America, the Beautiful." A sailor handed it to the military chaplain, who then presented it to the next of kin with the following words, "On behalf of the President of the United States, the Chief of Naval Operations and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your mother's service to this Country in World War II."
Then came the bugler's "Taps."
"Taps" was composed by the Union Army Brigadier General Daniel Butterfield, while in camp at Harrison's Landing, Virginia, in 1862. It became known as "Taps" because it was often tapped out on a drum, whenever a bugler was unavailable, and was widely used by both Northern and Southern armies.
Restless thoughts followed me in the hush and quiet that ensued that sweltering day.
A part of me had been rebelling, fighting within me to scream out the rage of thousands of mothers at the inhumanity of war. I came of age at a time in which such displays in the face of the military were common, as the government was waging another useless carnage, in Vietnam. Yet the effect of the military's psychological operation on me had been uncanny.
Still a vaguely agnostic Christian, I had prayed with feeling and been moved at "Taps." My rebellious feelings had felt undignified in the face of young boys who might be called upon to die, no matter how cruelly meaningless the conflict.
It's a clever thing to have these ceremonies, one family by one family, out of sight from the glaring eye of the press. I had been challenged at the gate due to my press badge; I was there as an individual, not a reporter, so I hid it thereafter. But I then realized this is a part of war the military wishes to hide.
No recruiter would want young men to see what their mothers might face. No dissembling president using pointless war to dole out billions to cronies would want the public to know at what human expense.
In a sense, all military funerals are efforts to assuage the guilt and responsibility of military and political leaders for having taken someone from a family and returned that person dead. It's the least a grateful nation can do. All such funerals are a human response in the face of a shameful reality; they are cathartic ceremonies and a public confession that we are a murderous species.
How much more grateful all of us might be if war's casualties were much rarer, the occasions far nobler!
Such, at least, was true in the case of the military service rendered by this one Second World War Navy lieutenant I went to mourn, one whose intelligence analyses undoubtedly saved thousands of American lives and millions of others from the scourge of the Axis powers. Full military honors, in this instance, were a fitting coda to a life's struggle, well fought.
In almost every respect, the occasion was uncommon. The family party was small. The wound caused by the nearly year-old death was almost healed. The death itself had come peacefully in the deceased's bed at home. The veteran was a female naval intelligence officer during World War II.
More than a funeral, it was an inhumation. There was no bathos, nor rage at the loss of a loved one at the hands of a negligent, selfish president waging a criminally stupid war in the Persian Gulf. World War II was indisputably the last "good war."
Instead, there was an astounding display of quiet dignity on the part of the U.S. Navy. A marching band, what looked to my civilian eye as a battallion of sailors, a horse-drawn caisson with a casket draped in the stars and stripes, a color guard.
I was reminded of Kennedy's funeral. My older son thought it was someone else's cortege, not his grandmother's. Perhaps Rumsfeld's (I only wish!). It was beautiful.
The band played "Come, Holy Ghost." Then we processed to the burial site to the sounds of the Navy hymn, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save." We stopped. Six sailors held a flag over the cremains. The Navy chaplain led us in prayer. We stood.
A line of about six sailors formed, raised their rifles and fired a three-rifle volley. The practice has its origins in an ancient war custom of bringing all fighting to a halt to remove the dead from the battlefield. Once each army had cleared its dead, it would fire three volleys to indicate that the dead had been cared for and that they were ready to go back to the fight.
Finally, the six escorting sailors folded the flag to the sounds of "America, the Beautiful." A sailor handed it to the military chaplain, who then presented it to the next of kin with the following words, "On behalf of the President of the United States, the Chief of Naval Operations and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your mother's service to this Country in World War II."
Then came the bugler's "Taps."
"Taps" was composed by the Union Army Brigadier General Daniel Butterfield, while in camp at Harrison's Landing, Virginia, in 1862. It became known as "Taps" because it was often tapped out on a drum, whenever a bugler was unavailable, and was widely used by both Northern and Southern armies.
Restless thoughts followed me in the hush and quiet that ensued that sweltering day.
A part of me had been rebelling, fighting within me to scream out the rage of thousands of mothers at the inhumanity of war. I came of age at a time in which such displays in the face of the military were common, as the government was waging another useless carnage, in Vietnam. Yet the effect of the military's psychological operation on me had been uncanny.
Still a vaguely agnostic Christian, I had prayed with feeling and been moved at "Taps." My rebellious feelings had felt undignified in the face of young boys who might be called upon to die, no matter how cruelly meaningless the conflict.
It's a clever thing to have these ceremonies, one family by one family, out of sight from the glaring eye of the press. I had been challenged at the gate due to my press badge; I was there as an individual, not a reporter, so I hid it thereafter. But I then realized this is a part of war the military wishes to hide.
No recruiter would want young men to see what their mothers might face. No dissembling president using pointless war to dole out billions to cronies would want the public to know at what human expense.
In a sense, all military funerals are efforts to assuage the guilt and responsibility of military and political leaders for having taken someone from a family and returned that person dead. It's the least a grateful nation can do. All such funerals are a human response in the face of a shameful reality; they are cathartic ceremonies and a public confession that we are a murderous species.
How much more grateful all of us might be if war's casualties were much rarer, the occasions far nobler!
Such, at least, was true in the case of the military service rendered by this one Second World War Navy lieutenant I went to mourn, one whose intelligence analyses undoubtedly saved thousands of American lives and millions of others from the scourge of the Axis powers. Full military honors, in this instance, were a fitting coda to a life's struggle, well fought.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Where's My Ice Floe?
Although the senilicide attributed to Eskimos was never actually a generalized custom, but rather an exceptional emergency response to famine in the 18th century, the idea captures my imagination.
It's not that I have elders to dispose of, as my parents and grandparents have been all dead for years. Rather, I find calm in the idea of climbing on an ice floe with the intention of drifting away in arctic seas without food or covering until death comes.
It seems a humane way of ending what at a certain age -- mine -- begins to become a useless repetition of failures and missteps that will only worsen. Instead of steady impoverishment, physical decline, probable dementia and an eventual long descent onerous to relatives and society at large -- not to mention supremely boring to myself -- the idea of drifting off leaves me in a supreme peace.
From my years in Canada I have learned that freezing to death is, among ways to die, relatively pleasant. Cold overcomes consciousness, one drifts into a sleep from which one never awakes. All in a matter of hours.
Let's face it, death isn't going to be easy or painless. A few hours of drifting away in subzero temperatures might entail a bit of initial discomfort, but it seems bearable to me.
No more waiting through useless decades of "golden age" ... just a quiet drift into silence. Where's my ice floe?
It's not that I have elders to dispose of, as my parents and grandparents have been all dead for years. Rather, I find calm in the idea of climbing on an ice floe with the intention of drifting away in arctic seas without food or covering until death comes.
It seems a humane way of ending what at a certain age -- mine -- begins to become a useless repetition of failures and missteps that will only worsen. Instead of steady impoverishment, physical decline, probable dementia and an eventual long descent onerous to relatives and society at large -- not to mention supremely boring to myself -- the idea of drifting off leaves me in a supreme peace.
From my years in Canada I have learned that freezing to death is, among ways to die, relatively pleasant. Cold overcomes consciousness, one drifts into a sleep from which one never awakes. All in a matter of hours.
Let's face it, death isn't going to be easy or painless. A few hours of drifting away in subzero temperatures might entail a bit of initial discomfort, but it seems bearable to me.
No more waiting through useless decades of "golden age" ... just a quiet drift into silence. Where's my ice floe?
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
In Memoriam
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange:
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell.
ding-dong!
Hark! Now I hear them,
Ding-dong, bell!
-- William Shakespeare
In memory of my father (1921-1980), who died Nov. 15.
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange:
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell.
ding-dong!
Hark! Now I hear them,
Ding-dong, bell!
-- William Shakespeare
In memory of my father (1921-1980), who died Nov. 15.
Friday, November 04, 2005
Disconnected
"The number you have dialed has been disconnected," the recording said. Can't be. That number worked for 40 years.
Roofers called to say they were on their way. A bolt of shivers -- the dreaded aunt! -- struck every diner's spine when the phone rang Sundays, the roast beef served. Canvassers called for Jimmy Carter. Aimless hours of murmurings caressed lovers' ears.
All these ran through the lines that reach the black bakelite telephones. Do they still belong to the telephone company? Probably. Who knows!
The roofers never came. The aunt is dead. Jimmy's gone on from the White House to build your house, especially if you're poor. The lovers, well ...
More things change, the French say, the more they stay the same: Plus ça change, plus la même chose. It's not true.
She died. The house has been emptied out. The phone's been disconnected.
Roofers called to say they were on their way. A bolt of shivers -- the dreaded aunt! -- struck every diner's spine when the phone rang Sundays, the roast beef served. Canvassers called for Jimmy Carter. Aimless hours of murmurings caressed lovers' ears.
All these ran through the lines that reach the black bakelite telephones. Do they still belong to the telephone company? Probably. Who knows!
The roofers never came. The aunt is dead. Jimmy's gone on from the White House to build your house, especially if you're poor. The lovers, well ...
More things change, the French say, the more they stay the same: Plus ça change, plus la même chose. It's not true.
She died. The house has been emptied out. The phone's been disconnected.
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