Whenever I find a newspaper lying around at a coffee shop or a doctor’s office, I don’t go for the sports, or the front page, or the comics. I like obituaries.
Maybe “like” isn’t the right word. I’m engrossed by obituaries. Obituaries are one of the few places in life where we’re forced to confront death as a real entity, as something that could happen to you, or to me. It’s there, in black and white, in the paper. Carol and Alan and “Bozo” and Wallace (all names from yesterday’s obits) are all dead and there’s something to be gained by confronting it.
Of course, we don’t really confront death even when we’re confronting it. You don’t often see, “Joe died,” in an obituary. You see, “Joe was drawn into the arms of his Heavenly Father,” or “Joe passed away,” or “Joe set off on a new adventure” (my favorite). Sometimes you get a glimpse at the cause of death, but only if it’s something totally mundane; “Betty passed away in her sleep after a long struggle with liver cancer.” You never see, “Jake electrocuted himself,” or “Biff overdosed on caffeine and had an aneurysm. ” And you never ever ever see “Jane committed suicide.” We, as a people, are utterly freaked out by suicide.
Maybe it’s because I’m getting closer to 40 that I’ve started re-examining my ideas about death. You cruise for a long time on the notion that you’re not going to be dying anytime soon. Certainly when I was 23 and making all of the most dangerous and irresponsible choices of my life, it never occurred to me that the consequence of any of those choices might be my own demise. There’s a name for that feeling of invulnerability: the Personal Fable. I like that name. We are each the protagonist of our own Personal Fable, and at 23 we haven’t gotten far enough along in the story for it to make any sense were the protagonist to die. “Siddhartha left his father’s house and set off to find enlightenment. But on the way, he stepped on a rusty nail, and died of tetanus.” That just doesn’t read right. But you start pushing 40 and you notice that people your age do in fact die from time to time and it starts to eat at you. If you die before the age of 40, they’ll say it’s a tragedy. If you die after 40, they’ll say “She was so young.” As if to say, “Yeah, at this age people are known to buy it, but usually not this early.”
So, yes, I admit that part of the reason I read the obituaries is to inoculate myself against the fear of death. Why do we get so weirded out by something that is an utter certainty? It’s scary, sure. But also kind of intoxicating, even liberating. Life is so much bigger than the mundane, day-to-day bullshit that I’m all caught up in at any given moment. Life, which is what you’re sitting in the middle of at this very moment, is really fucking important. It matters. The acknowledgment of death is a wake-up call to your ego, saying Time is short. This is all fleeting. Live now.
There’s something else trippy about reading the obituaries. Very often you’ll get a three or four paragraph summary of the deceased’s life, from birth, through war and marriage and career and retirement and death. (You also get a list of everyone still living that they’re related to for reasons I don’t quite understand. Seems like if my dad died, I wouldn’t need anyone to tell me that I was related to him. Maybe it’s so my friends will be nice to me? Are my friends reading the obituaries?) In most of these summaries there’s a certain sameness, especially those of my grandparents’ generation, so many of whom were raised in the Depression, went off to war, came home and started familes and careers in insurance or advertsing or wholesale grain distributing, worked for a long time, retired, played golf or hunted or fished, and then got really old and died. Nothing particularly exceptional about any of it, but presented as a neat little package, there’s a lovely elegance to it. The wonder of having lived through all that suffering and strangeness and confusion and boredom and melancholy and contentment and pleasure and joy.
Now here’s the trippy part. If you read enough of them, the epiphany hits you: this is true for everyone. Everyone you see, everywhere you go. Everyone you’ve ever met, seen in the grocery store, talked to on the phone, flipped past in the phone book, fought past in a crowded movie theater. Each of these people has a life that is filled with dreams and disappointments and hopes and fragility and at least some measure of beauty and grace. Each one of them has a point of view, a way of looking at the world. Each of them, except for a very few unlucky ones, loves and is loved in return. Think about how complex and textured your own life is and then apply that complexity to everyone around you. Histories. Secrets. Sins, angst, romance, revenge, ecstasy, violence, terror. It’s all out there, all woven into the fabric of every single person. If you try to drink it all in at once it will totally blow your fucking mind. Give it a shot sometime. The next time you’re standing in a crowded room, or driving past an apartment building, or sitting in the bleachers. Try to imagine the breadth of life that inhabits each person around you. It is intoxicating and fearsome, and it is all around you all the time.
Just like death.
For some reason it was the suicide of David Foster Wallace that made my own mortality seem icily real. Wallace was just a few years older than I am. He was simply brilliant; Infinite Jest is one of my favorite books of all time. And so I felt a certain kinship with Wallace, and I always felt that here was someone who had “made it.” Someone like me who was intellectual and self-conscious and obsessed with the strange minutiae of life, and he’d written this brilliant book and it was beloved by many, and he was the toast of the town, and there’s that part of me that thinks, “Well, once you’ve gotten to that point, you’ve made it. You’re safe. Everything’s okay.”
But of course that’s not how it works. You never “make it.” That would imply that your life has come to an end. David Foster Wallace had achieved a certain kind of perfection, and what it instilled in him was a terror that he would neve be able to reach such great heights again. That instead of having the pressure off of his shoulders, it was now that much more intense. He was a person who had suffered terribly with depression. The bad stuff. The serious sit-on-the-bed-in-a-darkened-room-with-a-gun-in-your-mouth kind of depression. Very depressed people often fantasize about killing themselves, sort of a wish-fulfillment thing, which seems very weird if you’ve never been really depressed, but there it is. But for David Foster Wallace, one day it just got to be too much and he opted out.
Confronting the idea of death is one thing — confronting the idea that life might one day become too much to live is something that nobody wants to dwell on. The title Infinite Jest, of course, comes from Hamlet, Hamlet describing the old Fool Yorrick’s personality as he regards the dead man’s skull. The “infinite” part seems fairly leaden from that perspective. Hamlet is repelled by the thought that the man who carried him on his back as a child has come to this ignoble end, and it strikes him that this is what happens to everyone. He makes the weak joke to Horatio, “Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole?” Even Alexander the Great is dust, and that dust could end up anywhere. Hamlet sees life as absurd and painfully so. Probably Wallace did, too.
I try not to. I like the obituaries becuase there’s a certain charm in them, a hominess. The obits say, we’re all in this together, pal. You and me and Carol and Alan and “Bozo” (whose nickname was never explained, more’s the pity). We’re all headed in the same direction sooner or later, and so maybe it’s not so big a deal.
And anyway, it’s not like it’s going to happen anytime soon.
