Too Soon to Say Goodbye Read online

  In the study, doctors didn’t have any better idea about when the patients wanted the plug pulled. In fact they fared worse—making the correct choice only 63 percent of the time.

  And here you are thinking that if anything happens to you, your surrogate will do exactly what you want.

  I will give you an example. The son in this story was the surrogate, and he said he knew precisely what his father would want if he were to become incapacitated. He wanted the plug to be pulled. The daughter insisted the father wanted to hang around for a much longer time. The problem here is that one family member may claim to know what the patient wants, but another will claim he wants just the opposite.

  This opens a whole can of worms about families, because in times of crisis everybody has their own opinion as to what their loved one wants. The son says, “Dad would want to go right now, peacefully,” and the daughter says, “He told me he wanted to hang in there as long as he could,” and then a third family member says, “Neither one of you knows what Dad wanted because I was the only one who ever saw him.”

  You can see the difficulty we’re in. The kicker is that in the study, it turns out that 70 percent of patients changed their minds.

  It’s a very tough thing to figure out, and all I can say is pick a surrogate (family member, lawyer, whatever) before you become incapacitated—then make sure that person knows exactly what you want.

  I think of myself because people are naturally selfish. I want a surrogate who is certain to know what I want when it’s time to say goodbye.

  I’m not being grim about this. Besides everything I have mentioned, things could become even dicier when money is involved. Then the question is, are we worried about the wishes of the patient or about the money involved?

  These are the decisions that we all face. For every person who is incapacitated there has to be a surrogate standing by—and a good surrogate is hard to find.

  My Plan

  The important thing about a hospice is if you can stay long enough you can say goodbye with dignity, and also plan your own funeral. It gives you something to do after you finish reading Vanity Fair.

  My plan was quite simple. Joseph Gawler’s Sons Funeral Home was down the street from my hospice, so I didn’t have far to go. I chose cremation for no other reason than it would be easier to transport me to my cemetery plot on Martha’s Vineyard, where Ann is buried.

  I’ll stay at Gawler’s for one night. Then Joel, my son, will keep my ashes at his house in Washington until they can be taken to Martha’s Vineyard, either by plane or by car—whichever is cheaper.

  As I’m planning my funeral, I keep adding details all the time.

  I make sure my obituary appears in The New York Times. As I’ve mentioned, no one knows whether you’ve lived or died unless they read it in the Times. I also make sure no head of state or Nobel Prize winner dies on the same day. I don’t want them to use up my space.

  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.”

  My funeral is a small private affair on Martha’s Vineyard. The navy’s Blue Angels will fly over, members of the Vineyard Haven Yacht Club will drop their sails, and golfers will observe a minute of silence.

  Friends on the island will gather at my grave site and sing “Danny Boy”—my favorite song, though I am Jewish.

  After the service everyone will go back to the Styrons’ for cocktails. I keep my funeral simple, because, as Walter Cronkite says, “Arthur wanted it that way.”

  A note on my cemetery plot: Peter Feibleman, a friend and writer, and I were taking a walk on Martha’s Vineyard along the road to West Chop one summer day in the mid 1980s when we passed a family cemetery. It belonged to the Look family, and upon closer inspection we found out that the first Look to be buried there was Thomas Look, in 1743.

  A man inside the cemetery was digging a hole with a shovel.

  Peter asked him, “How’s business?”

  The man said, “It’s getting better. We’re adding twenty-five sites which the county intends to sell.”

  “How come?” I asked.

  “There are no living members of the Look family left to pay maintenance.”

  “Can anyone purchase a plot?”

  “If you have five hundred dollars and don’t buy it for a profit.”

  Peter and I looked at each other, then rushed back to tell the gang.

  Bill and Rose Styron said, “We’ll take two.” Mary and Mike Wallace said, “Put us down for a pair.” John and Barbara Hersey said they were in. Lucy and Sheldon Hackney (Sheldon was then the president of the University of Pennsylvania) and Ann and I said we each wanted two. My friend Peter, who wasn’t married, took two on “spec.” He said he wanted to sleep next to the woman he loved for eternity.

  A week later, after doing the county paperwork, we all went down to the cemetery to pick out our plots. People behave strangely in a cemetery. Rose Styron said, “I want to be over there.” Then she changed her mind and said, “I want to be over here. No, I’ve changed my mind—over there.”

  Bill said, “Wallpaper—she is picking out wallpaper.”

  Mike and Mary Wallace said they didn’t want to be near the road as it was too noisy.

  I told Ann, “Let’s pick a plot under the oak tree so we don’t have to be buried with suntan oil.”

  When our friend Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist, heard about the plan, he called us the “Nouveau Dead.”

  Peter Feibleman picked two spots near the gate. As luck would have it, that summer he met the girl of his dreams. He fell in love with Carol Burnett, the TV and motion picture star. And she fell in love with him.

  Like any man in love, Peter gave Carol one of his plots.

  Sadly, when the summer was over, Carol was no longer in love, and she wrote me a letter in which she said, “I no longer want to be buried on Martha’s Vineyard with Peter. I want to be buried on Maui, next to Lindbergh.”

  I replied, “A deal is a deal, but the gang is offering a very reasonable compromise. If you get cremated you can spend six months in Maui and six months on Martha’s Vineyard.”

  Selecting the Urn

  Early in my hospice stay I kept pestering Joel about going over to Joseph Gawler’s Sons Funeral Home on Wisconsin Avenue to select an urn for the cremation. I think he was stalling, but finally I pressed him into it.

  We had to get an ambulance for me to get over there. I have been to Gawler’s many times, so I was familiar with its rooms. The funeral director showed us to the room that had all the urns in it. The least expensive ones were around $500, but I was told we could go up to $4,000.

  Here is a partial estimate that Gawler’s gave us for a first-class cremation in early 2006:

  • Direct cremation with container—$4,300

  • Cremation container—$1,600 to $2,800

  • Cremation-oriented casket—$3,500 to $16,000

  • Crematory fee—$350

  • Online Internet Memorial/Archive—$295

  • Use of Facilities and Staff Services for Visitation, including coordinating the funeral arrangements, supervision of funeral, and staff to assist with the funeral ceremony—$800 per day

  • Equipment and Staff Services for Service at the Crematory, including accompaniment of remains to crematory, supervision of service, display of floral arrangements, and staff to assist at the service—$900

  • Use of Reception/Hospitality Room and supervision during reception—$800

  • Urns—$900 to $11,000

  • Flowers—$25 to $10,000

  • Clothing—$100 to $5,000

  The funeral director estimated that what we wanted would cost about $10,000. We thanked him and told him he would see us again.

  I later asked Joel to describe his feelings at that time. This is what he wrote:

  Dad kept asking me to take him to a funeral home. He really wanted to plan all h
is details. His bugging me about it went on for a week. My main concerns were transportation and logistics. Several weeks earlier, I had arranged for Dad to visit the Washington Hospice. I’d gotten a wheelchair van. Dad was wheeled into it and then strapped down—a twenty-minute process—and then the van proceeded to break down three times on the fifteen-minute ride to the Washington Hospice. Dad was stuck in the wheelchair and despondent. We eventually made it, but the whole event was traumatic for both of us.

  When Dad wanted to visit the funeral home I kept picturing our past transport disaster, and tried to avoid the trip for as long as possible.

  He pushed until I gave in, so we hired Mo, a friend of Dad’s who is also a taxi driver and has his own station wagon. Getting Dad in and out of the car wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. We even stopped at McDonald’s on the way home to celebrate. (No breakdowns.)

  The actual visit to the funeral home wasn’t too bad; a little surreal, but given the past few months, this was like adding another car to the circus train heading down the tracks of life.

  I had contacted the funeral home previously and a funeral director was waiting for us. He gave us a tour of the facility, but we were already familiar with it because in 1994, when Mom died, we had her visitation there.

  Dad was curious about the urns, so the director took us through their display room, which was filled with all sorts of urns at various prices. Dad settled on the inexpensive white one.

  They also had keepsake urns in which a few of the ashes would be placed. I picked out a couple of urns, in case some relatives would want one. My nephew Ben wanted one to take to Paris, where he would toss the ashes off the Eiffel Tower. My sister Connie, who worked part time at a funeral home in Culpeper, Virginia, delivering corpses, would pick out her own keepsake urn at her funeral home. My other sister, Jennifer, heard that we had been to the funeral home and eventually wanted all the information, so I gave her a card from the director.

  Dad wanted to feed and water all the people who might come to pay their respects. The director offered to provide catering and Dad settled on finger food.

  He also was curious about the room where the visitation would take place and the placement of the urn. The funeral home had a contraption that looked like it was right out of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The urn would be placed in the ark to be carried wherever it needed to go.

  After spending a morning at the funeral home, the McDonald’s ice cream tasted especially good.

  The Memorial Service

  Wait—there is a lot more. I haven’t told you about my memorial service in New York, to be held a week after my burial on Martha’s Vineyard. The service takes place at Carnegie Hall.

  After I am cremated, my ashes are collected and, during the memorial celebration, they are sprinkled over every Trump building in New York City.

  The rules for my memorial are that everyone must leave his or her watch at the door so they won’t be checking the time during the service.

  Kleenex is provided.

  I weighed carefully whether there should be a day off for schoolchildren, but decided against it when the mayor said it would cost the city overtime and snarl up the traffic.

  As they enter, the mourners will be given a handout that says, “In lieu of flowers, the family requests that you make contributions to the Brady anti-gun lobby”—my favorite charity.

  The Harlem Boys Choir will sing “Going Home,” the New York Symphony will play “I Love Paris,” and Pavarotti will sing “The Marines’ Hymn.”

  The New York City Police bagpipe band will play in the street before the service starts. Flags will be flown at half-mast on every hospital that treats depression and a moment of silence will be observed.

  I have been very careful about choosing the people I want to speak at the memorial. Too many times, a speaker will talk more about himself than the dearly departed. I recall one eulogy that went like this: “We are here to say goodbye to Davey. I had lunch with him a week before he died. I remember it well because I had Dover sole with a lobster sauce and a bottle of Montrachet 1999.”

  The rabbi at my service will share a few words to warm up the crowd. I don’t know him, so whatever he says has to be taken with a grain of salt. Cardinal Egan also speaks and reads a letter from the pope. Billy Graham will read one from the president. I figure that among the three of them, I’m covering all the bases; one of them is bound to have some idea where I am going.

  I don’t want any politicians to speak, because my mourners would think I’d sold out.

  The way I see it, Carnegie Hall is jammed, and thousands of people are standing on Fifty-seventh Street, even though it is snowing. The memorial service is the hottest ticket in New York. Scalpers are selling orchestra seats for $250.

  After saying kind things about me, Mike Wallace and Bill Styron talk about my depression and what it meant to them. People in the street listen to every word and watch on a large TV screen. The service is televised on NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, the BBC, and Court TV.

  No detail is too small to consider.

  The thing I am proudest of is that I provide parking in Central Park for all the chauffeured limousines. I assume my friends will arrive in style. This does not mean the people driving their own cars will be ignored. We will have valet parking for them on Columbus Circle.

  If I must say so myself, it will be one of the most celebrated memorial services New York has ever seen.

  People will talk about it for years.

  10

  The Salon

  The beauty of not dying, but expecting to, is that it gives you a chance to say goodbye to everybody. When I thought I’d only be here for two weeks, I figured it wasn’t enough time to bid my goodbyes, but now, because I’ve been here so long, I’ve been able to say farewell to relatives, friends, and strangers. Some of them have such a good time they come back again and again.

  So far, I’ve heard from everybody in my life—from my public school days, the University of Southern California, the Marine Corps, my Paris pals, and all the people I knew or who claimed they knew me in Washington. I received nearly three thousand letters, many of them from people who were connected to me (or thought they were) in some way. I had met them in Paris, or I’d spoken at their graduation. Then the visitors started to arrive. Every letter, phone call, and visit made me remember an incident or a little gift from the past.

  From the Halls of Montezuma…

  The commandant of the United States Marine Corps, General Mike Hagee, visited me and I told him all about my life in the Marines, which was quite different from his. Like all Marines, I inflated the role I played during World War II.

  When Tom Brokaw called wanting to know why the commandant had come to see me, I said, “They just found out I put the flag on Iwo Jima.”

  I told General Hagee that I was in a fighter squadron and I cleaned guns. Whether he was impressed, I’m not sure. You never question another Marine’s credibility. I told him that at the end of the war I talked myself into being a publicity man for the Cherry Point, North Carolina, Marine Corps football team. The team wasn’t very good, but since the war was over, my only job was to make them sound fantastic. We played a big game in Washington against the Air Transport Command. We lost, 37 to nothing.

  All the top brass who had read my glowing press releases had bet on Cherry Point. It was after that game that they called me in and suggested I might want to leave the Corps.

  Many years later, in 1999, General Jim Jones (who was the commandant at that time) gave me a parade on Eighth and I streets at the Marine Corps barracks. If you haven’t been in the Marine Corps, you might not know this was a super honor. I think I got it for my column, and not for my service in the war.

  Among all my hospice visits, the one from the commandant was the most exciting. As soon as he left, I called everyone I had served with and told them to eat their hearts out.

  Dying Wish

  It is amazing how many people visit if you are in a convenient
location and they’ve been told you’re going to die. I take full advantage of my situation in order to get people to do things for me.

  For example, the dean of a fancy California university who is also a good friend called and asked if I wanted anything or if he could bring anything. I replied, “Yes, my dying wish is this: Would you arrange for two young friends of mine to get into the freshman class?” It was a weird request, and I doubt the dean has ever been asked to fulfill a dying wish of that kind, but he said, “If it’s really your dying wish, I’ll try.”

  By chance (or not), both girls got in. I made not only the two girls happy, but also their parents and grandparents. The grandfather of one of the girls sent me three cheesecakes and three food baskets from Zabar’s.

  From Childhood Past

  I saw my life passing through my hospice living room. Twenty alumni from the Hebrew Orphan Asylum showed up to visit. I was briefly a ward of the HOA in 1930. When I was five years old my father had moved my sisters and me from the home in Flushing with the Seventh Day Adventist nurses to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum on Amsterdam Avenue in New York City. I was there only two months in quarantine before being placed in my first foster home, but I made friendships that last to this day.

  All of the HOA visitors to the hospice were in their eighties, and their leader was Norman Rales, a very successful industrialist. They sang songs to me that we had learned at the institution.

  Other alumni of the orphanage found out about my being in the Washington Hospice and put a notice in their newsletter asking everyone to call and write to me. The funny thing was, they all claimed to be my bunkmate. What they didn’t know was that I never spent time in a bunk in the orphanage.

  I heard from kids I knew in Public School 35 in Hollis, New York. Some of the remaining members of the Happy Girls Club wrote to me. They were an informal sorority who did everything together in public school. I used to hang around with them on my roller skates. I was their mascot. Even in elementary school they flirted. Years later the girls bought tickets for the second balcony to see my play, Sheep on the Runway. They called themselves “Artie’s groupies.”