“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.” –Hector Berlioz
We are constantly told by lawyers, estate planners, the AARP, and other mountebanks that dying without a will is a thoughtless act of passive-aggressiveness toward our “loved” ones.
“Don’t wait until it’s too late,” we are cautioned, “until no matter how you cut the cards (in dog, human, or metric years) you’re not playing with a full deck.”
I know the party will be over one day, and that I ought to be prepared for the time when a spectral voice will whisper, “Your ride’s here.”
Therefore, instead of checking the sports scores first thing each morning, I check the obituaries to see if I’m still alive. I show up for doctors appointments without having to be subpoenaed. At least once a month I vow to give up red meat, white meat, the other white meat, coffee, eggs, dairy products, soft drinks, hard drinks, and chemical additives.
Actually, as Woody Allen said, I’m not afraid of dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens. Moreover it’s not dying that worries me so much as the thought of what occurs afterward. Most accounts of heaven make it sound like a hootenanny at the Betty Ford Clinic on a Sunday night–and the only way to get there is in a hearse. Reincarnation is somewhat cheering. Coming back again is my only chance of repeating some of my favorite sins: but what if I came back as a person with no sense of irony? Or with lots of kids instead of dogs?
Actually, the older I and my dogs become, the more I envy them. When they look into a mirror, they don’t notice the tracks left by the Armies of Encroaching Age. If dogs walk into a room and can’t remember what it was they went there to get, they don’t curse the dying of the light, they just scratch themselves and lie down. They’ll never spend a day in a nursing home; they won’t have to put up with senior-moment jokes from their friends; they won’t have to contend with Brillo pads growing out of their ears; no one will ever take a picture of their navels from the inside; and they won’t have to go to anyone’s funeral.
Dogs are also spared the knowledge of such monstrosities as Older Americans Month, which is “celebrated” each May. I’ve got news for the folks who thought that one up: Getting old is nothing to celebrate. The only thing worse than being an aging youth is being an aging old person. Besides I find it difficult to get excited about a month that has also been designated National Arthritis Month, National Osteoporosis Prevention Month, National Better Hearing and Speech Month, National Electrical Safety Month, National Bike Safety Month, National Mental Health Month, and National Skin Cancer Awareness Month. If you judge a month by the company it keeps, May is a dodgy character with creaky bones and bad skin who is apt to electrocute himself while joyriding on his stairlift.
Hell, of course, does not figure into my calculations. Several years ago I bought a Deathbed Conversion policy from Repent Life and Casualty after seeing Ed McMahon talking up the company on television. I display my policy in a guilt-edged frame above the bed. In the space where it says beneficiary, I wrote me. I selected Repent Life and Casualty because I like its motto: “The afterlife you save may be your own.”
I was pondering all this one day while sitting in a supermarket with my left arm in the cuff of one of those free-blood-pressure-reading machines. Then it hit me: No one is truly prepared for death who hasn’t written his or her obituary.
An obituary is the most important statement about a person, yet few people devote to their obituaries the time that they deserve. Such neglect is puzzling. Couples spend a great deal of time crafting their wedding vows, and marriage, as we all know, does not always last. Death does.
As anyone who reads obituaries soon discovers that most of them sound like the work of amateurs or low-paid staff writers at best. How tragic. The thought of dying is only somewhat more disturbing than the thought of one’s obituary being written by a stranger who isn’t attuned to the nuances of language or…worse yet…who splits infinitives.
My mother got around the obituary dilemma by specifying in her will that she did not want an obituary. Neither did she have a viewing or a public funeral. She must have been furious with someone to whom she did not want to give the satisfaction of knowing she had croaked. At first I thought Mother’s approach was a perversely swell idea, then I realized that if a writer died without an obituary, people might think he had died of writer’s block, a condition known as dying tabula rasa.
Consequently after the blood-pressure cuff in the supermarket had released its death grip on my arm, I realized that I wouldn’t know true peace until I had composed my obituary. I rushed home, cleared my calendar for the rest of the day…unlike Nature, I adore a vacuum…and went to work. Remember, you read it here first.
Throughout his life, which, he regrets to inform you, ended recently, Phil Maggitti defied expectations. His father expected him to be a priest; his mother expected him to heal the sick; his seventh grade teacher expected him to spend most of his adult life in jail; his basketball coach expected him to pass the ball occasionally; his friends expected him to return their calls; and his editors expected him to meet deadlines.
Mr. Maggitti, an only child and proud of it, displayed a facility with words at an early age. He wrote battle reports in a wry, faux Hemingway style describing the encounters between the plastic cowboys and Indians that were the playmates of his youth. His devoted mother encouraged the development of his narrative voice by taping pull quotes from his reports on the refrigerator. His working class father, upon going to the refrigerator for a snack one evening and encountering, “As smoke rose from the campfire in a seductive dance,” remarked testily, “That boy needs to spend more time playing outdoors.”
After a sylvan interlude in prep school, Mr. Maggitti took a degree in English at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. There he acquired a love for trench coats, Fitzgerald, and foreign films. Upon graduating he taught English in junior high school for ten years, often referring to himself as “the foreign language teacher.”
A profound dislike for children and the inability to function in groups larger than one led Mr. Maggitti to court a solitary muse. During his most productive writing years–1980 to 2010–he wrote eight books and more than eight hundred articles. His work centered around animals, whose company he preferred to that of most people. His Postcards From the Pug Bus, a charming collection of anecdotes and reflections inspired by his devoted pugs, is destined to be a classic in its field.
In addition to being one of the most lucid, witty, and engaging prose stylists of his day, Mr. Maggitti was a splendid, if ruthless, editor. After he had rewritten everything but the author’s name in one magazine article he had been given to edit, the Aauthor” complained that she could no longer Ahear my voice in the piece.” Mr. Maggitti promptly replied, “That isn’t your voice, madam, it’s the wind whistling through your head.”
As Mr. Maggitti was an inveterate nonjoiner, his estate requests that in lieu of donations to worthy causes, people should send back anything they have borrowed from him–or a check in the amount of that item’s fair market value at the time it was borrowed. You know who you are, and so do his executors.
Armed with my Deathbed Conversion policy and script approval on my obituary, I
am able to rest easier at night. Nevertheless I still believe that only the paranoid survive, so I have taken one final precaution.
I have never bought that nonsense about everyone’s death diminishing me. We are all in this alone. I strongly suspect, however, that my own death will diminish me greatly. Therefore when the bell does toll for me, I’m going to let my answering machine pick up–and it’s going to be set for “announcement only.”
