Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ject of one of my obituaries, and each time it happens—that is, each time I have to write
about someone I've previously encountered in the flesh—my mind does the same thing,
goes back to the moment of the meeting and imagines that there's a frisson of recognition
on both our parts, an eerie, telepathic message that lets us in on our future connection.
In the Ingmar Bergman film version of this tale, I'm the guy in the black robe carry-
ing the scepter. But what would it be like to be the other guy, to realize that by chance
you've just shaken hands with your obituarist, someone who, at some uncertain future
time, will consign you to history? It's actually the case that once or twice I've run into
someone whose obituary I've already written; not too long ago I sat across the aisle from
one of them—okay, it was Tony Bennett—at a Broadway show. So far I've resisted the
mischievous, troubling impulse to let them know.
The
Times
doesn't abide the euphemisms for death and dying, and I feel well instruc-
ted by that policy, so in our pages (and in my mind) nobody passes on or passes away or
ascends to heaven or goes to a better place. They just die. They're just dead. That sounds
like a cold thing, perhaps, but it's one way that writing obituaries has unromanticized
death for me, if it ever seemed romantic. For the sake of argument I'll even stipulate the
possibility of an afterlife, but that still leaves people on earth susceptible, in the wake of
a loved one's death, to agonizing loneliness, lingering, unendurable pangs of grief, and
the inconsolability that comes with an irrecoverable loss.
Granted, for that kind of suffering we damn well should be rewarded with an after-
life, but I'm not counting on it. And given the fact of the deaths of those around me the
last few years, I think my job has made me feel more fundamentally connected to other
people in general. You can't talk to grieving relatives day after day and not recognize
how the universality of death contributes to our sense of a shared human condition. If
there's an especially gratifying thing about writing obits, that's it.
Maybe it seems odd to bring up politics at this juncture. But the poison in our public
intercourse lately—the red state/blue state divide, the venomous antagonism between
liberals and conservatives—has certainly cheapened the idea, or mocked it, anyway, that
people do share a condition as we live on the earth. I don't think I'm alone in feeling
a kind of despair over what sometimes seems like an enveloping malevolence in the
world—or in feeling a kind of guilt for now and then participating in it. My views are,
for the most part, politically liberal, and when I listen to Limbaugh, Hannity, and Coulter
and their ilk maintaining their reactionary brand by spewing ugly disdain at people like
me—Why do I listen at all? That's a good question—the rage they stir up in their de-
