Dying in Character: Memoirs on the End of Life

8. “I Never Realized Dying Could be so Much Fun”: Art Buchwald and Too Soon to Say Goodbye

= 209 < chapter 8 “I Never Realized Dying Could Be So Much Fun” Art Buchwald and Too Soon to Say Goodbye = A rt Buchwald, one of America’s most beloved humorists, wrote three memoirs, including Too Soon to Say Goodbye, which he began while waiting to die in a Washington, D.C., hospice. He entered Washington Home and Hospice in mid-March 2006 after the decision to end dialysis following the amputation of the lower part of his right leg due to poor circulation. He expected to die in a few weeks, but then, to his doctors’ amazement, his kidneys started to function again. Hundreds of visitors, celebrities and strangers alike, came to pay tribute to him, and he received nearly three thousand letters. In hospice he indulged in his lifelong passions of eating, holding court, being with friends, and writing. After five months, he checked himself out of hospice, returned to his home in Martha’s Vineyard, completed Too Soon to Say Goodbye, and then died quietly in January 2007 at the age of eighty-one. Buchwald became a media sensation while he was dying, but he was already known to millions of Americans for his long-running, nationally syndicated column in the Washington Post and for his dozens of books, fiction and nonfiction, lampooning every aspect of American society. Described as a “Will Rogers with chutzpah,” he had a droll wit that was playful and light-hearted. Nevertheless, early maternal loss darkened his vision, scarring him with lifelong feelings of anger, guilt, and abandonment . Too Soon to Say Goodbye touches lightly on these emotions, but 210 = “I Never Realized Dying Could Be So Much Fun” < before examining the ways in which he writes goodbye to his readers, it is instructive to look at his two earlier memoirs, Leaving Home and I’ll Always Have Paris. Life as an Orphan Buchwald never saw his mother, who was institutionalized immediately after his birth. She spent the remaining thirty-five years in a state psychiatric hospital, where she died at the age of sixty-five. He later admitted that like many children who never knew their mothers, he spent his entire life searching for someone to replace her. As a young boy he was placed in a foundling home because he had rickets. Though he was Jewish, he was then sent to a boarding school run by Seventh-Day Adventists, where he was subjected to anti-Semitism and religious indoctrination. “For many years I had dreams from that period,” he confesses in Leaving Home. “A blurred likeness of the devil kept popping up, and it wasn’t one of those friendly devils you see on canned ham salad—he was one mean son of a bitch” (29). When Buchwald was five, he and his three sisters were placed in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York City by his immigrant father, who could not afford to raise them during the Depression. “Except for the shame of being in an ‘orphanage,’ the home could have been considered a very proper prep school” (Leaving Home 48–49). Although he was well cared for in the orphanage, he felt lonely and unwanted, feelings that haunted him for the rest of his life. After the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, Buchwald lived in a series of foster homes, none of which seemed like a real home. His sisters were finally allowed to move in with their father, but he was forced to remain in the foster home, a decision that angered and saddened him. By the time he turned fifteen, he was allowed to rejoin his family, but the reunion was hardly joyous: “I began to look back on my foster homes with nostalgia” (107). Buchwald’s childhood was not entirely Dickensian, but it was traumatic enough, and he was never able to forget growing up without a mother and a father. The nomadic existence left him feeling parentless, homeless, and rootless. Like the bereft Pip in Great Expectations, he learned to parent himself, a difficult process because of the lack of role models. He ran away from home when he was sixteen, lied about his age, and enlisted in the U.S. Marines during World War II. Following the war, he studied at the = Buchwald and Too Soon to Say Goodbye < 211 University of Southern California but was unable to graduate because he had never completed high school. In 1993 the university awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Letters, an irony he couldn’t resist sharing with the thirty-two thousand people who heard him deliver the commencement address that year: “I told the students about my failure to get a diploma and pointed out that since USC had seen fit to give me a doctorate all these years later, all of them wasted their time” (Leaving Home 231). In 1948 Buchwald moved to Paris on the GI Bill; he lived there for fourteen years before returning permanently to the United States. He began his professional career as a columnist for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune. He was the only American journalist writing a regular column in Europe at the time, a position that gave him access to well-known Americans living abroad. His trademark political and social satire appeared in such books as Have I Ever Lied to You?; “I Am Not a Crook”; Washington Is Leaking; While Reagan Slept; “You Can Fool All of the People All the Time”; Lighten Up, George; We’ll Laugh Again; and Beating around the Bush. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Outstanding Commentary in 1982 and in 1986 was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. As Buchwald gained international fame and literary success, however, he struggled with mental illness. Like his mother, he suffered from severe depression and manic depression, and twice he was hospitalized for suicidal feelings, which he later wrote about in his three memoirs. In 1949 Buchwald met a young Irish American woman who had recently arrived in Paris. Born and raised in a small Pennsylvania town, Ann McGarry began her career as a salesperson, but through a series of lucky breaks and persistence, she soon became the publicity director for one of Paris’s most influential clothes designers. She and Buchwald dated for more than two years before he agreed hesitantly to marry her. The story of their life together in Europe appears in I’ll Always Have Paris and in her memoir, Seems Like Yesterday (1980). Her book is unusual in that she is always being “interrupted” by her husband’s commentary, which at times confirms but at other times disconfirms her point of view. Seems Like Yesterday is revealing in the ways in which husband and wife disagree with each other. He is the “famous writer” whose need to have the last word, and sometimes the first word, does not always seem funny. He acknowledges that Ann did not always find his articles amusing. “She 212 = “I Never Realized Dying Could Be So Much Fun” < said I was destroying any chance of making it in the newspaper world and she didn’t want to have anything to do with someone who made a spectacle of himself” (Seems Like Yesterday 30). Buchwald’s success was due to his ability to make a spectacle of himself. He rarely jokes, however, about his fear of emotional commitment. He is silent about this issue at the beginning of Seems Like Yesterday, implying that his desire to date as many women as possible during his early years in Paris was due to his devotion to writing. “How can someone write the Great American Novel if he has to worry about meeting the same girl every night for dinner?” (34). As time progressed, his wife became increasingly frustrated. “I yearned to hear Art say, ‘I love you,’ but he refused as adamantly as if I’d asked him to change his name. ‘I have never said those words to anyone, and I don’t think I ever will’” (46). Later in the memoir Buchwald addresses his fear of emotional commitment, tracing it to his early life as an orphan. The idea of settling down with a woman was so upsetting that he would find himself frequently throwing up in the bathroom . “Years later when I went into analysis my psychiatrist and I figured out that it was my way of trying to say something” (105). Buchwald’s commitment phobia also appears in I’ll Always Have Paris, where he relates it to his need for constant approval from his readers. Because of my foster-home background and being deprived of a normal family existence, the idea of having a family of my own was as frightening as anything I could imagine. I saw myself as an uncle, but not as a husband and father. This was my way of avoiding pain. And the more I thought about the responsibility and taking on such alien emotions as love, the more I upchucked and wanted to escape. What I planned to do was spend my life entertaining the crowd. I needed constant applause. I would go from one gathering to another, making new friends and new fans. Childhood wounds were too deep, and I was fearful of letting anyone get too close to me. I was a mess. (93) Spousal Loss and Guilt Seems Like Yesterday ends in 1963, when the Buchwalds decide to return to the United States. The memoir closes with Buchwald’s telling admission = Buchwald and Too Soon to Say Goodbye < 213 in his last interruption: “My conclusion is that like most people who spent so much time in Paris, we have tended to romanticize our lives and remember the good things, blotting out the bad ones” (219). Some of the “bad” things emerge in Too SoonTo Say Goodbye, where he comments cryptically on their long marriage. “We were married for forty years. It was a happy marriage if you don’t count the unhappiness” (40). Hints of the conflicted marriage appear briefly in I’ll Always Have Paris. After revealing his reluctance to marry, he skips over most of their life together and then comments on how they grew apart after their children left home. Estrangement turned into anger and bitterness—and then tragedy struck. “Before the divorce proceedings were started, she contracted lung cancer, which spread. The doctors pronounced her illness terminal and she spent one year suffering, much of it in bed. Joel, our son, quit his job to take care of her” (98). Buchwald was not a caregiver, and he never discloses what, if anything, he learned from his wife’s terminal illness. A priest was instrumental in their reconciliation, and during Buchwald’s last visits with her, “we revived some of the magic of our marriage” (99). Ann Buchwald died in 1994, and in Too Soon to Say Goodbye he reveals additional details of her final days. “She coped by turning her anger against me, to the point where I felt it best for both of us if I left home. Still, we remained very close” (40). He then elaborates on the dark emotions he felt after her death, speaking with a seriousness unmediated by his legendary humor. “When a loved one dies, you carry around a lot of guilt. I still do. And even now, I hurt when I think about her. In an odd way, my days here in the hospice are somehow connected with her death. I think of her [buried] on Martha’s Vineyard and dream that I’ll be with her soon” (40). Exorcising Ghosts Grief is not always a laughing matter for Buchwald, and his three memoirs reveal the extent to which he struggled against mental illness. He became obsessed with his absent mother, seeking her everywhere. She remained the mysterious source of much of his sorrow. “In 1963, I had a severe depression myself and was hospitalized. In my darkest moments in my room, I would cry, ‘I want my mommy, I want my mommy.’” Nor was his psychiatrist surprised to hear about these dreams: “I had gagged 214 = “I Never Realized Dying Could Be So Much Fun” < up a whole lifetime of maternal deprivation” (Leaving Home 15). Buchwald did not attend his mother’s funeral, but he recalls writing a eulogy based on what he thought her to be like. He imagined her showering all of her love on him, her only son, and he dreamed of becoming a doctor , lawyer, or accountant to please her. He then refers to the advice he received from a physician about the tendency toward self-blame after a relative’s death: “A psychiatrist told me that when you grieve you think of all the things you didn’t do for your loved one and not the things you did do. I should have become a rabbi, which would have pleased my mother very much. I should have married a nice Jewish girl rather than a nice Catholic girl. When I left home I should have called her every day” (Too Soon to Say Goodbye 43). Buchwald never eulogized his mother’s death, but writing about her in Leaving Home brought therapeutic relief. “I never told anyone about my eulogy, but it always made me feel better” (43). Many years after her death he and his siblings decided to visit her grave, but no one knew where it was located. After much difficulty they located the cemetery and found her gravestone, at which they stared in silence. “I felt I was at the end of a long journey and the circle had now been closed” (45). He finds a mother surrogate in his hospice nurse, Jackie Lindsey, his “chief Ball Breaker.” She bathes and dresses him every day and sometimes causes him pain when she touches his “family jewels.” Nevertheless, he refers to her as the “mother I never had. She gives me hope, love, and encouragement . She listens to all my stories and I listen to all of hers” (Too Soon to Say Goodbye 26). Buchwald knew his father, but the relationship between them was largely nonexistent. He describes him as a “Sunday father” because none of his children lived with him. “He used to say, ‘You dasn’t do this,’ and ‘You dasn’t do that.’ I didn’t argue. I just did as I pleased. I was his only son and I hurt him—first when I refused to be bar mitzvahed, then when I ran away from home and joined the Marines, and finally when I moved to Paris. He couldn’t understand why I wanted to become a writer” (Too Soon to Say Goodbye 46). Buchwald attended his father’s funeral and mourned his death, “mainly for the lonely life he led after my mother was put away, living in one room in the Bronx. I still talk to him and I tell him, ‘I am sorry that I wasn’t bar mitzvahed, Pop’” (47). Additional information about Buchwald’s difficult childhood and its = Buchwald and Too Soon to Say Goodbye < 215 impact on his later life appears in Leaving Home. “I am new at writing memoirs,” he announces in the introduction. “It’s probably the most egotistical project a person can undertake, but it does provide an opportunity to sum up the few years I’ve spent on earth in my own words” (7). The experience of writing a life review helped him come to terms with maternal loss. “Early in life I had to explain her absence to strangers, as did my sisters. The easiest thing was to say she died giving birth to me. I don’t know how many times I told this lie, but apparently every time I did I committed a form of matricide. She was dead as far as friends and strangers were concerned, but she was very much alive to me—sequestered away in a distant place I had never seen. The story was credible— but for most of my life I have lived in fear that someone would unearth my dirty secret and I would be severely punished for not having disclosed it” (12). Writing about shame, paradoxically, was a countershame technique , freeing him from the fear of exposure. Writing about shame also helped Buchwald come to terms with his own death. It is rare in our death-denying culture to write humorously about death—and even rarer to write humorously about one’s own impending death. Writing as Rescue Buchwald also writes about the strained relationships with his children, whom he neglected in his pursuit of fame. In I’ll Always Have Paris he acknowledges that in his role as a “hot-shot columnist” he missed his children’s birthday parties. He doesn’t trace the neglect of his children to his father’s neglect of him, which a psychobiographical interpretation would suggest, nor does he disclose his children’s reactions to reading his stories about his family. But he implies that writing was a form of reparation , a way to repair past relationships and work through guilt and anger. Indeed, writing was a form of self-analysis and self-therapy, enabling Buchwald to understand a lifetime of anger, guilt, sadness, and confusion . Writing, particularly his inimitable satirical writing, helped him to express his fury. “My anger was buried deep behind the humor. I have always had trouble with anger. I have swallowed it, and it’s come back later to give me the shakes. As a child, I vowed never to show it, no matter how upset I became—because if I did, everybody would discover that I wasn’t a nice person. My heroes in this world are those who can get rid 216 = “I Never Realized Dying Could Be So Much Fun” < of their anger and not feel bad about it.” When asked what he tried to do with his humor, his response is immediate: “I’m getting even. I am constantly avenging hurts from the past. . . . For me being funny is the best revenge” (I’ll Always Have Paris 80). Writing is also a way for Buchwald to confront his fear of death. “For a humorist, I think a lot about death. During both my depressions, I contemplated suicide.” Depressions are cruel, he points out, and if a person “is egotistical enough and in a suicidal frame of mind, he methodically plans his own funeral” (Leaving Home 100–101). Echoing Nietzsche, he implies that anything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. “Things were so bad at first I was even placed in a psychiatric ward. I was certain I would never laugh again. But a funny thing can happen to you in a depression. If you don’t hurt yourself, you can gain tremendous insights and empathy, find inner strengths and hidden talents. It’s a mysterious process, but if you hold on, you become a wiser and better person” (101). Writing about death was a counterphobic act, a way to master his fears and defy death. He could not have known while penning Leaving Home that writing was also a way to rehearse and celebrate his own death, as we see in his end-of-life memoir. Poster Boy for Death Too Soon to Say Goodbye begins with a preface written in July 2006. The first sentence, “What started out the worst of times ended up the best of times,” echoes the opening of A Tale of Two Cities. How can dying be the best of times? Buchwald’s daunting challenge lies in answering this question. Buchwald became a “media star” by accident when he spoke on Diane Rehm’s radio show. “I figured, what the heck, I had nothing to do. I went on and talked about hospice, about not taking dialysis, and about what it was like to die. I had a feeling Diane’s listeners would want to know what I had told my children, and I discussed how they were reacting to my decision. The interview produced 150 letters and e-mails, the majority of which were sympathetic” (Too Soon to Say Goodbye 20). He expected to die in a few weeks and decided to make the best of the situation , eating whatever he wanted—including McDonald’s milkshakes and hamburgers. He entertained a constant flow of visitors, some of them = Buchwald and Too Soon to Say Goodbye < 217 famous, such as Ethel Kennedy, John Glenn, Tom Brokaw, and Russell Baker, others ordinary people who wished to pay their last respects. He took delight in holding court in the hospice living room, which he called his “salon.” Following his interview with Diane Rehm, he appeared on George Stephanopoulos’s program This Week and became the subject of a long article in the Sunday New York Times. He also appeared on Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour, CNN, and the Today show. He had truly become a media star for death. Buchwald shatters one taboo after another by speaking and writing about the termination of life. To begin with, he doesn’t use euphemisms like “pass away.” Instead, he speaks openly and honestly about death— and the euphemisms he uses, such as “big sleep” and “dirt nap,” poke fun at linguistic evasiveness. Far from withdrawing into loneliness, silence, and depression, as many people do in his situation, he relishes his new role as “hospice poster boy.” He loves being the center of attention, and he uses this position to educate the public about the importance of hospice , for which he becomes an eloquent advocate. “The hospice volunteers play a vital role. Many first learned about the hospice program when a family member or loved one received hospice care. They too are drawn by a desire to comfort those at the end of their lives. Some volunteers see the work as a way of confronting their own mortality” (Too Soon To Say Goodbye 23). He gives his readers a brief history of hospice, describes what it’s like living there, offers information about hospice of which the public may be unaware, and expresses gratitude to the many staff members and volunteers who help him. “The nice thing about a hospice,” he writes, “is we can talk about death openly. Most people are afraid that if they even mention it, they will bring bad karma on themselves” (29). Buchwald’s public endorsement of hospice is also, indirectly, an endorsement of Kübler-Ross’s pioneering research on death and dying. His response, however, to the many get-well cards sent to him in hospice could not be more different from her reaction to the get-well cards sent to one of her dying patients. “I shared with him,” she writes in Questions and Answers on Death and Dying, “ my own gut reactions of rage and anger at the wall covered with phony get-well-soon cards when everybody who sent him a card obviously knew he was in the final stages of his life and totally unlikely ever to recover” (25). Her ability to empathize with her patient’s anger proves to be helpful to both of them, but Buchwald’s response is 218 = “I Never Realized Dying Could Be So Much Fun” < no less appropriate and effective: he gently chides the many strangers who send him get well cards: “Even now, some people just haven’t figured out what I’m doing here” (Too Soon to Say Goodbye 95). He remains optimistic that people will talk about death if they are allowed to do so. He encourages the hospice residents and their families to talk about death, and he gives readers permission to think about their own mortality. In a health article published in the NewYorkTimes on January 23, 2007, shortly after Buchwald’s death, Jane E. Brody noted that the humorist hoped to make “hospice” a household word. Brody herself is an advocate for hospice. She points out that the average patient is in hospice for less than three weeks before dying. “The most common report from families after a loved one’s death is regret that hospice had not been called in sooner,” Brody states. “In a study of 275 patients, families that benefitted from hospice thought three months would have been optimal and that less than three weeks was too short.” Though Buchwald died not in hospice but in his home, Brody declares that he was a “living testimonial to the benefits of hospice care.” In another New York Times article on August 23, 2010, Brody reports on a study appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine that confirms the many benefits of palliative care associated with the hospice movement. Patients with metastatic lung cancer who received palliative care as well as standard cancer therapy “had a better quality of life, experienced less depression, were less likely to receive aggressive endof -life care and lived nearly three months longer than those who received cancer treatment alone.” One of Buchwald’s most endearing qualities is his humility in the face of death. “What’s beautiful about death,” he tells us, “is you can say anything you want to, as long as you don’t lord it over others, pretending to know something they don’t” (Too Soon to Say Goodbye 30). He prepares for death while focusing on life, reminding his readers that the “big question we still have to ask is not where we’re going, but what we were doing here in the first place” (30). Sometimes his tone becomes acerbic, as when he declares, “I have no idea where I am going and no one else knows. And if they claim they know, they don’t know what the hell they are talking about” (11). Both Buchwald and Kübler-Ross accept death but for strikingly different reasons. Buchwald appreciates the life he has been privileged to enjoy, and what he finds “beautiful” about death is its great mystery. By = Buchwald and Too Soon to Say Goodbye < 219 contrast, Kübler-Ross remains convinced that life after death is a “wonderful and powerful experience” because of God’s unconditional love. He is in no rush to leave the life he loves; she cannot wait to leave a life of frustration and begin the final journey. These differences should not obscure their many agreements over death and dying. Like Kübler-Ross, Buchwald considers dying an important part of life, and he is gratified that hospice, an institution Kübler-Ross is credited with bringing to the United States, enables people to receive compassionate care. Like her, he knows that people appreciate those who can speak honestly and openly about death. It does not take long for Buchwald to become a hospice superstar. Believing he was put on earth to make people laugh, he finds humor everywhere. Thus he uses the couch in the family room for “therapy sessions ” with friends. Instead of crying over his amputated leg, he boasts about having a handicapped parking permit to attend athletic events. “Goodbye, leg. I didn’t need you as much as I thought” (Too Soon to Say Goodbye 138). He takes pleasure in revenging himself on those who have victimized him, as when he portrays himself as David waging war against the Goliath film company Paramount, which stole his idea for a film later starring Eddie Murphy. Recalling an incident of racial hatred in boot camp, he reaches a distinctly non-Christian conclusion: “You can hate someone forever even if you don’t know his name” (126). Buchwald would agree with Anatole Broyard and D. W. Winnicott that one should be alive when one dies. One of the oddities of dying, Geoffrey Scarre points out, is that it is not the opposite of living, as death is the opposite of life. “Dying is a form or phase of living, Scarre suggests. “We need to be alive to be dying, and only when we are dead are we finished with dying” (149). Scarre reminds us that the dying person “may still have many things to do.” Buchwald’s dying, as he describes it in his end-of-life memoir, is an intensification of his living. The Blues Brothers Too Soon To Say Goodbye urges a more compassionate attitude toward mental illness. Again Buchwald speaks from personal experience. One of the most powerful sections in the memoir is the four-page chapter entitled “Depression,” which opens with a startling observation: “Many 220 = “I Never Realized Dying Could Be So Much Fun” < people thought I was having or would have a depression when I lost my leg and entered the hospice. I was depressed, but that was nothing compared to the episodes I experienced in 1963 and 1987” (36). Losing a leg turned out to be less traumatic than losing his mind. In 1997 he and Mike Wallace disclosed on Larry King Live their long histories of depression. Hearing that Buchwald had two serious bouts with depression, his friend William Styron, a fellow sufferer, told him that he would be inducted into the “Bipolar Hall of Fame” if he became depressed again (38). Tipper Gore gave Buchwald a “Lifetime Achievement Award for Depression” for his mantra, “Don’t commit suicide, because you might change your mind two weeks later” (37). One of the “blues brothers,” Buchwald used humor to make fun of the scars of childhood, but the pain did not go away, and the depression turned into anger toward others and himself. Twice he was hospitalized for suicidal feelings, severely depressed during the first episode and manic during the second. “No one recognized my manic phase because people thought I was being funny” (Too Soon to Say Goodbye 38). Then came the crash, when he was both suicidal and homicidal. His physician talked him out of his plan to throw himself out of the window of a skyscraper, and soon he admitted himself to the psychiatric ward of Georgetown University Hospital, where he was treated successfully with lithium. The Man Who Would Not Die Buchwald credits his humor for allowing him to enjoy the final months of his life, but it was also his profound gratitude that is evident throughout Too Soon to Say Goodbye. He is grateful for his family, friends, colleagues , physicians, hospice workers, readers—and for life itself. Gratitude is one of the “positive” emotions, along with joy, hope, admiration, pride, and love. Gratitude is, as Robert C. Roberts suggests, a “deeply social emotion relating persons to persons in quite particular ways” (65). Gratitude is generally viewed as a positive counterpart to vengeance. Gratitude “tends to bind us together in relationships of friendly and affectionate reciprocity, whereas resentment tends to repel us from one another, only to bind us in relationships of bitter and hostile reciprocity” (Roberts 68). Buchwald enjoys revenging himself on his enemies in Too Soon To Say Goodbye, but gratitude is the dominant emotion. Sometimes = Buchwald and Too Soon to Say Goodbye < 221 people express gratitude to ingratiate themselves with others, as La Rochefoucauld claimed: “Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise. The gratitude of most men is merely a secret desire to receive greater benefits” (quoted in Buck 100). Buchwald’s gratitude, however, is genuine, reflecting his belief that life is a gift to be shared with others. Too Soon to Say Goodbye is a crowd pleaser, affirming the importance of gratitude, good works, memory, and self-fulfillment. Buchwald affirms joy without glossing over sorrow, and there is no subject on which he is unwilling to write, including life’s inevitable regrets and disappointments . The pen never fails him: everything is grist for his writerly mill. Too Soon to Say Goodbye is not a literary masterpiece, as Philip Roth’s Patrimony is, nor is it an intellectually powerful memoir, as Edward Said’s Out of Place and Tony Judt’s The Memory Chalet are. Unlike Kübler-Ross’s The Wheel of Life, Too Soon to Say Goodbye does not read like a science fiction thriller; unlike Harold Brodkey’s This Wild Darkness and David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death, it lacks narrative suspense. Nevertheless , Too Soon to Say Goodbye remains a remarkably optimistic account of a man’s love affair with life. And it is genuinely groundbreaking in shattering one taboo after another about dying and death. “The Man Who Would Not Die,” as Buchwald wryly calls himself, wrote Too Soon to Say Goodbye in a few months, and then he left hospice to spend the remaining time with his family. He wrote the afterword at his home on Martha’s Vineyard, after living almost five months in hospice. Nor did death, when it finally came, silence his voice. The day after his death the New York Times posted a video obituary in which he declared, “Hi. I’m Art Buchwald, and I just died” (www.nytimes.com/ packages/html/obituaries/BUCHWALD_FEATURE/blocker.html). We don’t see a death or dying scene in Too Soon to Say Goodbye, nor do we see a transition from life to death. Buchwald never describes the process by which he accepts the inevitability of death. Instead, we see a writer whose body is no longer intact but whose imagination has never been more creative. If his decision not to spend the rest of his life on dialysis indicates his wish to live and die on his own terms, the extra nine months he was granted is a tribute to his indomitable spirit. He led a storied life that he chronicled in dozens of accounts, fictional and nonfictional, and he wrote about deferred death with unsurpassed verve. Too Soon to Say Goodbye defies much of the conventional wisdom 222 = “I Never Realized Dying Could Be So Much Fun” < about dying and death. Buchwald never portrays himself as isolated, alienated, confused, frightened, angry, or depressed about his impending death. Nor does he portray death as ugly or menacing; death is not the Grim Reaper but simply the biological end of life. Nothing about his dying is shameful or off-limits to his satirical imagination. He demonstrates the possibility not only of a good but an entertaining death. His “dying trajectory,” a concept first suggested by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss in Awareness of Dying, was longer than anyone expected, and he put the extra time to good use. Scripting Death Buchwald’s experience in hospice, where he defied everyone’s prediction about imminent death, turned out to be even more fantastic than the one he had imagined nearly forty years earlier. In Shadow Box, George Plimpton asked several of his writer-friends, including Buchwald, how they imagined their own endings. Plimpton gave the writers the example of Jean Borotra, the French tennis star who imagined dying as he served an ace on center court at Wimbledon. In Plimpton’s words, “Art Buchwald , like Borotra, fancied himself dropping dead on the center court at Wimbledon during the men’s final—at the age of ninety-three” (287). In Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost, Nathan Zuckerman cites Buchwald’s fantasy, adding that it “must have seemed a lark of an assignment [for Plimpton] to ask other writers to tell him how they imagined themselves meeting death—scenarios that, as he recounts them, were invariably comical or dramatic or bizarre” (264). Buchwald refers to this fantasy briefly in Too Soon to Say Goodbye: “I insist that my obituary not say, ‘He died after a long illness.’ I want it to read, ‘He died at the age of 98 on a private tennis court, just after he aced Andre Agassi’” (52). Buchwald states in the afterword to Too Soon to Say Goodbye, upon leaving hospice and returning to Martha’s Vineyard, that he “never realized dying could be so much fun” (145). Few of us may agree with him about that or rival his experience as a hospice superstar, but it doesn’t matter. He was fortunate to experience the good death that he did, as his physician notes in one of the eulogies in the epilogue. “When Art died, it was a good death. He was comfortable and understood that in his very good and extraordinary life he had achieved his goal of being loved, and = Buchwald and Too Soon to Say Goodbye < 223 that was the very best therapy” (168). Given his lifelong fantasies of scripting death, Buchwald died in character, affirming life to the end. How did Buchwald feel about completing his end-of-life memoir? Did he experience a welcome sense of closure? In Too Soon to Say Goodbye he notes his long correspondence with William F. Buckley Jr., who, when he heard Buchwald was dying, wrote a sympathetic letter and mentioned that “Hertz might throw in six pallbearers for free” (92). Buckley died in 2008, and his son, Christopher Buckley, admits in his memoir Losing Mum and Pup that although most authors are “happy—thrilled, even, to the point of doing cartwheels—upon finishing a book,” his father’s depression deepened after completing what he suspected would be his last book (146). I suspect that Buchwald was delighted he was able to complete Too Soon to Say Goodbye, though he may have wished to write a sequel. No one has written about dying with such feisty humor as Buchwald. He wanted the world to notice his life—and death. Thinking about his obituary in the New York Times, he says he doesn’t want any head of state or Nobel Prize winner to die on the same day he does: “I don’t want them to use up my space” (Too Soon to Say Goodbye 52). He knew he would be dead by the time his memoir was published, but he wanted one more opportunity for fame, immortality, and a posterity self. He also knew he would remain alive as long as his books are read. Sandra M. Gilbert calls this phenomenon “textual resurrection” and cites the following line from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—“Who touches this book touches a man” (72). Simon Critchley observes in The Book of Dead Philosophers that “wherever a philosopher is read, he or she is not dead. If you want to communicate with the dead, then read a book” (243). The same is true of end-of-life memoirists. They remain alive to us as long as we remember them. Or as Critchley says, citing Jacques Derrida’s belief in “impossible mourning,” the “dead live on within us in a way that disturbs any self-satisfaction, but which troubles us and invites us to reflect on them further” (243). We smile upon completing Too Soon to Say Goodbye because of Buchwald ’s ability to remain joyful despite or because of the many sorrows he has borne. “I’ve always been an upbeat person. It’s the thing that has kept me going all my life. To the many people who wrote me, I mostly answered like this: ‘Thanks for your letter. I’m writing as fast as I can. Love, Art’” (91). 224 = “I Never Realized Dying Could Be So Much Fun” < “Love, Art” contains an unintended pun, a double entendre, for we love both the man and his art, the many irrepressible stories, funny and sad, satirical and poignant, that he penned for more than half a century. In devoting himself to his art, he managed to stave off death and helped countless readers endure their own losses. “Performing for laughs was my salvation,” he writes in Leaving Home. “The other thing that helped me escape the reality of our lives was to concoct mysterious stories about myself” (61). His love for himself was, finally, inseparable from his love for art and fantasy. In Too Soon to Say Goodbye he transmutes what might otherwise be a story of suffering and sorrow into an affirmation of a joyful, fulfilling life. He found a way to make dying less lonely and frightening, first by holding court in hospice, then by appearing on radio and television programs, then by scripting his own funeral, and finally by writing Too Soon to Say Goodbye, which provides us with the pleasure of an earned happy ending. ...