Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I've been thinking about my mother for a number of reasons, some of them obvious,
but mainly because her death begat a short train of emotionally bruising events that
have colored my life since then. The day we buried my mother was the last time I saw
my former girlfriend, Catherine, and it was the day before my father and I nearly came
to blows in a raging argument about whether or not he'd been attentive enough to his
children—not to his children, to
me
—while my mother was alive.
Of course, at the time I was feeling acutely that I hadn't been attentive enough to
her
while she was alive; the guilt and remorse vibrates like a bass note through the eulogy.
Doesn't it?
As it happens it wasn't the first time I'd written about death, or even the first time I'd
written about the death of someone I knew. Michael Maggio, a theater director in Chica-
go who was also a friend, had died the previous summer, and I'd written his obituary.
That was long before I started writing obits every day, and at the time it seemed to me a
strange but welcome way to make work—journalistic work—more personal than it usu-
ally is.
Mike had a wild life story. He had been close to death from cystic fibrosis when
a double lung transplant in 1991 gave him his vigor back, turning him from a barely
breathing, walking corpse into a robust, ruddy-looking man with a soccer player's
bounce in his step. Shortly after his recovery, he came to New York to direct a show at
the Public Theater, and we met when I wrote a story about him. Later, after I moved to
Chicago for the
Times
, one of the first social occasions of my time there was Mike's wed-
ding. That was three years before he died of complications resulting from all the drugs
he had to take to keep his body from rejecting his new lungs.
Out of friendship, out of a sense that I could do justice to Mike's talent and his
courage, out of wanting to be of service to Mike's friends and family, I volunteered to
write the obit. Ordinarily, a reporter will recuse himself from writing about someone he
knows, but that's when the person is alive. The rules change a bit after death, I decided.
Mike's résumé and his medical story together made him a suitable obit subject, but I
thought I'd write about him with more sympathy and intimacy than someone else might,
and it's true, I did. Still, I have to admit that what I wrote was probably a little more
eulogy than obit. I know now there's a line there that can be hard to see.
Anyway, that was the first time as a writer that I seriously thought about death, prob-
ably because it was also the first time I thought about it seriously as a mortal human
being. I'd been lucky up to then. My grandparents had all died when I was young, too
young to feel myself anything but indestructible. I'd had no experience with death as an
adult, and so I'd had no occasion to mull over what the living owe to the dead or how
