Reader! Drop everything! Whatever the hour, whatever your task, whatever your age, inclination, state of grace or race, health or wealth, drop what you’re doing, however worthy (or unworthy), lope, leap, creep or crawl to your laptop, desktop, smart phone, pen and paper, etc. and write … no, not your “Last Will and Testament” or even your “Living Will.” Certainly not your “Advance Health Care Directive,” the current robotic medical argot for deathbed instructions which at the crucial moment will be ignored or overridden. No, no, no! Reader, do something useful for yourself and your survivors. Write your obituary!
WHAT HAS BROUGHT SOLITAIRE TO THIS STATE OF MAD EXHORTATION?
It seemed to Solitaire that Tuesday had been going on for weeks. It had begun at five o’clock that morning and had not yet, some eighteen hours later, come to a close. In that telescopic span – and she couldn’t be sure whether time had been foreshortened or elongated -- she had, as she saw it through a prism of tremulous self-pity, been chivied, chastised, queried, castigated, humiliated, humbled, tumbled, put through the wringer, and brought to her knees.
So when, at eleven that night, Solitaire climbed, dog-tired into bed with her dogs and her Mac, not to check her emails or read the Times online, or even to sleep, but to write an obituary for her husband, Em, who had died in the early hours of the previous morning, she felt, frankly, overtaxed.
It was not that she begrudged Em this obituary; quite the contrary. She wanted above all things to compose the most loving, lucid, elegant and insightful obituary that she could manage and it was this very fear – the fear that under these harried circumstances she would prove insufficient to the task -- that gave rise to her sense of anxiety and frustration.
There were two other factors at play here: First, the obituary was, as they say, “time sensitive.” One could hardly submit an obit to a daily newspaper three months after the subject’s demise, at least not if it was intended as a news item. She had promised the Washington Post editor that she would email Em’s obit by midnight. Secondly, an obituary was in effect a mini-bio that required factual accuracy—always shaky terrain for Solitaire -- and even, perhaps, some research. Also problematical. If, for example, she did not know her husband’s birth name (admittedly not the norm for most bereaved spouses), how could she be trusted to know something as ancillary as his dates of military service, or, come to think of it, in which branch of the military he had served, or in what year he had entered the Foreign Service?
As it happened, Solitaire knew, tangentially, that Em had enlisted in the Air Force in preference to being drafted into the Army, because he had once told her, apropos of motion sickness whilst map-reading in a car, that in the Air Force he had signed up for navigational school, but that every time he had gone up on a training flight and looked down at the navigational charts, he had thrown up all over them.
The Air Force was prepared to be patient but, finally, when he had all but depleted their supply of charts, he was transferred to a desk job at Harlingen Air Force Base somewhere deep in the heart of Texas not far from the Mexican border. She remembered that the base was in Texas and near the Mexican border only because Em mentioned that he had once spent a night in jail for brawling in a bar in Matamoros. Such are the mnemonic devices we deploy.
Of course, why Em wanted to be a navigator in the first place was quite beyond her, because after three decades of driving with him she knew for a fact that he had no more directional sense than a twirled partridge. Though he did possess the dubious virtue of consistency.
Of course, why Em wanted to be a navigator in the first place was quite beyond her, because after three decades of driving with him she knew for a fact that he had no more directional sense than a twirled partridge. Though he did possess the dubious virtue of consistency.
Propped against the pillows, Solitaire gazed with blank eyes at her blank screen. The clock ticked on. No epiphanies streaked across her blank mind. Finally, however, this question occurred to her:
Why hadn’t Em written his own obituary?
It wasn’t as though he had lacked the time; death, after all, had not taken him unawares. Nor had he lacked the skill; he was a brilliant writer with a finely-honed command of language, a man who had spent his entire life mastering the art of expression, the author of numerous articles, essays, communiqués, lectures, fiction, non-fiction and poetry.
Who better to write his obit? He would have known his real name; he would have known what rank he attained in the Air Force. And who better to review and evaluate the salients of his life; which to select, which to discard? Only two months ago, his noble mind still intact, he could have polished off this assignment in an afternoon, with time to spare. But, strangely enough, it never occurred to him, let alone to her. Why “strangely?” Because for many years Em had been a student and connoisseur of the art of the obituary.
He rarely missed an end-page obituary in the Economist and gave Solitaire tear-sheets of the best of them. What made them so enjoyable, besides the graceful, expansive writing, was the esoteric choice of subject: Pattabhi Jois, the Ashtanga yoga guru ... Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered the psychedelic properties of LSD ... Charis Wilson, Edward Weston's beautiful model and lover whose photograph, "Nude," became an icon.
The problem with emulating the Economist was that expansiveness was prohibitively expensive. What Solitaire soon discovered, to her surprise, was that unless one was a newsworthy personality, obituaries were not only not free, but astonishingly costly and were submitted as though they were classified advertisements. The New York Times, for example, charged $262.60 for the first four lines (one line consisting of 25 characters, including spaces and punctuation) and $52 for each line thereafter, with 250 lines being the maximum length. A photograph of the deceased cost $1300. Even local newspapers, many of which once ran free obits as a service to their readers, now charged as they would for any classified. The Arizona Daily Star, charged $5.98 per line and $90 for a photograph.
For the survivors, then, the question became: how to combine brevity with grace, economy with eloquence? Most private obits did not even try; they limited themselves to a brief, bone-dry recitation of a few pertinent facts and dates dusted off for the perusal of family and friends one last time.
For the survivors, then, the question became: how to combine brevity with grace, economy with eloquence? Most private obits did not even try; they limited themselves to a brief, bone-dry recitation of a few pertinent facts and dates dusted off for the perusal of family and friends one last time.
Solitaire was no better. She would have liked to say something personal about Em -- that two of his favorite films were “The Seventh Seal” and "Tootsie"... that he loved Bellow, Bach, Dylan Thomas, van der Weyden ... that he considered running a form of prayer and ran ten miles a day... but in the end, she did not.
She wrote the skeletal bio -– the facts, the dusty dates -- and obediently hit "send" at five minutes to midnight. Then she turned out the light and as she lay in bed, waiting for the ambien to kick in, she finally had her sought-for epiphany, and it was this: a personal obituary should resemble a poem, not a poetic eulogy extolling the virtues of the deceased, but a poem in the sense that it would capture and distill in a few lines the essence of the subject.
The poem that came to mind as she lay drifting into sleep was Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess. Why she settled on that particular poem, a celebrated tale of Merger and Murder told by the late wife’s husband, she could not say; she knew only that it seemed to exemplify the qualities she sought.
A Renaissance nobleman (said to be based on Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara), is showing a visitor his renowned art collection, which is housed in his splendid nine-hundred year old palazzo. Strolling along a gallery, the Duke stops before a covered painting and drawing open the curtain, reveals a startlingly lifelike portrait of a beautiful young woman, who is, he tells his guest, his recently deceased wife.
He points out the “depth and passion” of her expression, which the painter has so cunningly elicited and captured. Of course, the painter, the Duke observes acerbically, was not the only man to be so favored by his young wife, who indiscriminately cast her smiling glances everywhere. As the Duke continues, his tone grows increasingly bitter and with each insinuation of her infidelity the reader has a chilling premonition of what is about to befall this lovely, probably quite innocent, young creature so filled with the joy of life. Here is the Duke’s description of his late Duchess:
“She had
A heart – how shall I say? – too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ‘twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace – all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men, -- good! But thanked
Somehow – I know not how – as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech – (which I have not) – to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark” – and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, not plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
-- E’en then would be some stooping, and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive.”
The guest, it turns out, is an emissary from another nobleman whose young daughter the murderous Duke is now contracting to marry.
As dusk came on, Solitaire, looking up at the massive stone walls of the town, felt a sense of menace and gloom. It was after all the city of Savonarola. She shivered and they went inside to change for dinner.
The next morning everything had changed. Sunlight flooded their pretty room and the French doors were open onto the balcony overlooking the gardens.
Solitaire sat in an arm chair, paging through the copy of Browning’s poems, and Em lounged on the bed drinking a large cappuccino. He turned on the television to catch the news, leaving the sound on “mute” while he searched the channels. Taking advantage of this interval, Solitaire, who hated the damned intrusiveness of the TV, quickly suggested that she read him “My Last Duchess.” He readily agreed, his eyes swiveling away from the set to watch her as she read. She had just read the line ”but who passed without much the same smile?” when she realized that Em was no longer looking at her, but at the television. She glanced up at him in annoyance and was surprised to see his face contorted in an expression of horrified incredulity.
“Darling,” she said, “it’s just a poem … a great poem, but still…”
He gestured wordlessly at the television screen behind her and as Solitaire turned to look he switched on the sound and she heard, as they would hear again and again and again that day and in the days to come, that Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris. Over the years, the two tales -- that of the Duchess and the Princess -- remained in Solitaire's mind, inextricably intertwined.
“Then all smiles stopped together...”
Em’s obituary ran in the Washington Post two days after his death, much abbreviated, and juxtaposed under the photograph of a deceased NBAA basketball player. Solitaire thought that Em, who loved basketball, would have been amused by that. But maybe not.
