The Vale of Restby Sir John E. Millais

Looking at the mortal remains of an 86-year-old Portuguese man in his coffin at the Beardsley-Mitchell Funeral Home in Ocean Beach on a fine spring afternoon I scrutinize his powdered and bald head, his thin lips pressed in manly resignation above his determined jaw, his eyelids at rest, his brow furrowed with decades of puzzlement, and I find not even the smallest hint that he may be on any kind of adventure. Still, I’m certainly willing to entertain the idea — aren’t we all?

Mr. B. was a retired instrument packer according to his obituary. He was born in New Jersey, lived in Point Loma for over 50 years, and was in the Navy for a year during the Second World War — which accounts for the folded American flag next to his head. In the front row of the funeral-home chapel are three mourners keeping vigil during the visitation. I take them to be the wife, son, and grandson of Mr. B., though I don’t know for sure. The son has no desire to talk to me when I tell him that I am writing about how we grieve and observe death in San Diego. I don’t blame him. He doesn’t know me.

The man is leaning forward, speaking past, I assume, his mother and talking to his son about the San Diego Padres’ spring training. Every few minutes he produces a handkerchief from his pocket, blows his nose quietly and unobtrusively, and wipes tears that are not there from the corners of his eyes. At intervals he turns and says something to his mother in Portuguese, gesturing to the few wreaths surrounding the coffin. One reads “Husband, Father, Grandfather.” A nice batch of lilies is situated at the foot of the coffin. All in all, I figure, a good $1000 worth of flowers. The three family members (I did establish they were family) are the only living souls (except me) in the chapel.

When I walked in I was greeted by Marion La Fave, a handsome and sober-looking woman who assured me that these were indeed the visitation hours for Mr. B. even though I seemed to be in the wrong place: three people, flowers, and, on closer examination, a body. Not even any music. La Fave handed me a memorial holy card: a picture of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph being looked down upon by a white-bearded deity surrounded by angels and channeling beams of light onto the trio via a white dove representing the Holy Spirit, otherwise known as the Holy Ghost.

On the back of this tableau is Mr. B.’s full name, his birth date (1913), the date of his death, and these unattributed words of comfort titled “To Those I Love”:

“When I am gone, release me, let me go. I have so many things to see and do. You mustn’t tie yourself to me with tears, be happy that we had so many years. I gave you my love. You can only guess how much you gave me in happiness. But now it’s time I traveled on alone. So grieve a while for me if grieve you must then let your grief be comforted by trust. It’s only for a while that we must part so bless the memories within your heart. I won’t be far away, for life goes on so if you need me, call and I will come. Though you can’t see or touch me, I’ll be near and if you listen with your heart, you’ll hear all of my love around you soft and clear. And then, when you must come this way alone, I’ll greet you with a smile and say, ‘Welcome Home.’”

This warm Hallmark touch seems to be the only sentiment in the room except for the ritual brandishing of the hankie. It strikes me as a frighteningly inadequate punctuation to the conclusion of a life spanning fourscore and six years, no matter how unremarkable. And the question is raised, as it always has been and will be: what, then, would be adequate?

Since I am now nearly the exact age of my father at the time of his fatal heart attack, I am even more aware of my mortality than usual. A lifetime of hypochondria has been honed to a fine tool I use to prod myself to work, to be kinder and gentler in dealing with the constant parade of fools and incompetents that surround me, to entertain seriously the idea of going to confession for the first time since 1968, and to really get around — no kidding this time — to reading Proust. I check my armpits and groin for swollen lymph nodes; each sniffle signals the collapse of my immune system. When I am greeted by friends, they no longer ask me, “How are you?” for fear of disturbing responses like “I have a vague feeling of existential dread” or “I could go at any time.”

Funeral at Ornans by Gustave Courbe

I was, according to my mother, “a morbid little kid.” I rehearsed my death at the dinner table, pretending to choke or succumb to poison. I was the best “dier” among my playmates; no one could clutch his chest, stagger, widen his eyeballs, fall, twitch, and do a death rattle like I could. I once broke my nose by pretending to be struck by an arrow while standing on the garage roof and falling, face first, onto a picket fence completely missing the pile of cardboard boxes I had arranged to break my fall. My father seemed to appreciate my artistry in this matter even as my mother urged him to “do something about your son.”

Mom once lost it with me for making six-year-old Barbara DePaulo next door cry when I, at age seven, announced to her, “You’re going to die someday, you know?” When the little girl insisted several times, “I am not!” I hammered back at her repeatedly,“Are too!” And then asked her if she wanted to go into the garage with me; I had something to show her. After closing the garage door and blocking the sunlight from the window by draping it with a deflated plastic swimming pool, I grabbed a flashlight from the workbench and held it beneath my chin, lighting my face from below. “This is what I’m going to look like when I’m dead,” I told her and she erupted in a sirenlike whine of “Ma-a-a, ma-aa...” I was disgusted with this lack of curiosity and sportsmanship on her part so I lifted the garage door to let her out. My mother was standing there, her mouth open in horror.

“Are you playing doctor again, you little son of a bitch?”

I was insulted at this suggestion.

“No. I was playing dead body.”

Mom now also burst into tears. “What is wrong with you?”

A good question and one, like many, I have never answered adequately.

Burial of the Count of Orgaz by El Greco

This all may have happened after the death of my Aunt Louise. One minute she was making vast trays of ravioli in her basement and the next, it seemed, she was on display in Fastino’s Funeral Home off Montrose Street in Chicago, powdered and painted like a passed-out transvestite. During the wake, amid howling, rending of garments, and much blubbering, I was fascinated with Aunt Louise in death in a way she never interested me in life. I kept staring at her, trying to put my finger on exactly the quality that was now missing from her. It was not simply animation, a look in the eyes, the color of her skin, though those things had certainly changed; something was absent here: silent, fled. The soul? Well, you might say,“It is life that is gone.” Or “consciousness.”Yes, yes, but what are they, what does that mean? Weighty questions for another time. My abiding fascination with la mort, the morbid and the moribund, has to do with that antimatterlike not is, that negative proposition so impossible to prove and at the same time so evident and undeniable, the un thing that both defines so well what is and poses the questions about its nature. The shadow, the space, the unheard echo just after that last audible strain, certain parts of North Park, all of these have held for me at one time or another a fascination that some would consider unhealthy.

“To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death.... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.” — Montaigne

My next funeral is in La Jolla. The deceased was born on my birthday, only in 1899. Mrs. E. was 99 years old and described in her obituary as “a homemaker.” The Congregational Church of La Jolla hosts the event, and there is no viewing of the departed. Relatives have flown in from the Midwest and the East Coast. Everyone is very well dressed in a suitably subdued and tasteful way. Trying to get a sense of the woman, I glean that she was a longtime member of the church, that she had a short-lived marriage in the 1930s but enjoyed a longtime female companion known as “Smitty,” and that Mrs. E. “could certainly stretch a dollar.”

“What can we say when someone has died after such a fine and such a long life?” the minister asks. “We can say thank God, not only for life, but also for the blessing of death. Thank God that rest has come for one that not only loved her life but after 99 years of it was weary.”

Mrs. E’s son, or possibly son-in-law, takes the pulpit after scriptural readings and recalls the woman’s love of crossword puzzles and the game of Scrabble. "I still remember her battered Scrabble box held together with nylon stockings. She could never bring herself to throw things like stockings away." A dusting of courteous laughter is scattered lightly throughout the dozed or so friends and relatives in attendance. She would, he said, always try to watch the sunset, "always looking for the green flash." He then recalls his last dinner with her at the Top O' the Cove restaurant were floating strands of chives. Mrs. E. did not care for chives, and he lovingly remembers removing one strand after another, placing them on the plate next to her but not before licking the broth off of each, “so as not to waste the soup.”

On leaving the service I feel a little fraudulent. I did not know Mrs. E. any more than I knew Mr. B., and I do not want to crash the proceedings, to violate or dis- respect the memory of those who have “passed on.” I merely want to see if I can get a sense of the absent per- son via the last gathering in his or her name. In the case of Mrs. E., I think I did somewhat, and I silently hope she finally saw her green flash.

“...no one gets up after death — there is no applause — there is only silence and some secondhand clothes, and that’s death .” — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

In 1968 I saw my father in his coffin, his hands folded, clutching a rosary. On his right-hand finger was his plain, silver-plated ring fashioned from a Japanese Zero downed in the Philippines during WWII. I remember thinking it absurd that the morticians had left his eye- glasses on. For what? Certainly he wasn’t born with them, though I must say they seemed every bit as much a part of him as his— now forever lidded — blue-green eyes, the double wave of light brown hair above his forehead, and, come to think of it, his necktie. All that was missing was his pipe. He had, I knew, just bought a brand-new one to take with him on his last fishing trip to Wisconsin. He had also bought a paperback, The President’s Plane Is Missing, that he had started to read and never finished. I often thought about picking up that book, reading it to retrace one of his final experiences, to maybe identify that point in the story where he had set it down before his heart failed for the last time. I never did, but I will one day.

Mostly I remember his face, his death mask: lined and care-creased, the makeup not quite smoothing over the grimace that must have formed as his heart constricted. I thought, “Wow, death really takes it out of you,” and then later amended that to life that takes it out of you.

At my father’s wake was Brother Ed, my art teacher from Carmel High School, a burly, crew-cutted athletic coach who liked to fire up football players and budding sculptors. He encour- aged me to attend the Art Institute in Chicago, where I had just begun the fall semester. I was surprised to see him four months after high school graduation and wondered why he was there. I knew why my uncle Nicky was there, of course. He was weeping and inconsolable, outraged that his younger brother should be taken before him. He was drunk and his wife, Marie, was trying to keep him from throwing himself in the casket and pulling my father out. Recently I commiserated with one of my brothers about that wake and the family in general. We decided that if a movie were to be made of it, the part of Aunt Marie would be played by Joe Pesci. She kept whacking my uncle with her purse and pulling him away from my dad, on whose lapels Nicky had a meaty grip.“Stop this, cazatta!” She had screamed at him. “What’s the matter with you? Jesus and Mary! Act nice, you goddamned stronzo!”

After Uncle Nicky had calmed down in the parking lot with a bottle of V.O. he had in the limousine, he turned his attention to me. I know he couldn’t have actually said this, but I remember it was something to the same effect: “If your father could see your sideburns, it would kill him.” He then went on about how I should join the Army like my father and fight the Japs.

It was a little more than a year later that I received my draft notice and had to report to the induction center in Oakland, California. That was 1969. I knew two guys who had gone to Vietnam; one of them was the brother of the guitar player in my high school band. He would come down to the basement when we rehearsed and urge us to play Kinks songs because he said we sounded like them. For this I really liked him. By 1969 he had his own memorial plaque at the base of the flagpole at our high school. The other guy I knew was a shy, friendly nerd who came back with pictures of himself holding up the ears of Viet Cong dead. I had a very bad feeling about going to war. I didn’t think I would do well there, and no one could adequately explain to me why I should go.

I think about these things as I walk among the tombstones through Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery and look for the graveside service of a Vietnam veteran I never met and whom I’ll call Joseph Lindgren. He was exactly my age when he died a few days ago. I feel maybe I should be there by his graveside, like Private Ryan in the movie. Maybe this guy had taken my place in some way. I try to be receptive to any unresolved emotion I might be packing about telling the Army shrink that day 30 years ago that I was gay and addicted to every drug known to man including Midol. I find Lindgren’s place, the niche in the wall where his ashes have been set, and try to get in touch with my feelings, reach inside to my inner 18-year-old draft- dodging self to maybe formulate an apology. I feel cold as the wind whips my tie around, and I lift the collar of my suit jacket. I say a brief prayer for infantryman Lindgren and decide I feel pretty much the same about writhing out of the Vietnam conflict as I did three decades ago. Any sense of guilt escapes me, and I’m a little disappointed in myself. Luckily, I’m used to that.

On this same day, a funeral is being held for a young border patrolman who died with several illegal aliens in an overturned truck in the canyons near the border. The Mass is being held at USD and is being attended by border cops, media crews, and Janet Reno, who undoubtedly sees this as an opportunity to point to Operation Gatekeeper. I have opted for a less celebrated death. Besides, parking at USD will be murder.

Joseph Lindgren’s final resting place is approached by three people, two men — one young, one old, Mexican looking — and one black woman maybe in her late 50s. I am a little surprised by this in light of the Scandinavian name of the deceased. The older man, say 50 years old, speaks to me but does not introduce himself. He is solidly built, wearing a black turtleneck and charcoal jacket. A silver chain is around his neck on which hang dog tags and a ring. It looks like a class ring.

“Joe would do anything for anybody,” the man says, looking out to sea at storm clouds gathering on the western horizon. High, restive clouds shred themselves like vast sheets of cotton and race overhead at almost time-lapse–photography speed. The wind is carrying his words over his shoulder, across Point Loma, over the white caps in the bay, toward the aircraft carriers and radar planes at North Island. “If you came to him with a problem and he could do some- thing for you, he would. He was a good soldier, he always wanted to take point.”

I picture Lindgren carrying a rifle at the head of a patrol, squinting into the jungle canopy for snipers, scrutinizing the undergrowth for mines, tunnels, the enemy, death.“How,” I ask,“did he... Was he ill?”

“Agent Orange,” the man nods.“He was sick for a long time. In and out of veterans’ hospitals. This is where he wanted to be buried, but we had to cremate him because there’s no more room here. You have to be cremated now. Yeah, he was sick for a long time.”

I ask about his nationality. His mother was Mexican, his father Swedish. I don’t ask who the woman is or the young man, and no information is volunteered. They get into a van and drive off. After a while, awed by the sheer numbers of white stones stretching away in every direction for hundreds of yards, I drive off also. I pass a few gravesite visitors, patriotic tourists with VFW and American Legion caps, berets and baseball hats, cameras, flowers, children in Sunday clothes climbing the grave markers as if the bone- white headstones were playground features beneath the ash and linen sky.

“People often make the mistake of being frivolous about death and think, ‘Oh well, death happens to everybody. It’s not a big deal, it’s natural. I’ll be fine.’ That’s a nice theory until one is dying.” — Chagdud Tulku, Rinpoche, Life in Relation to Death

I have now made a habit of reading the obituaries in the Union-Tribune. In a piece off the AP wire I see that writer/director Garson Kanin has died at 86. I met him once with his wife Ruth Gordon at a book signing in New York. Nice man, and his wife was very funny. She’s dead now too. Among the local death and funeral notices, I see that family members and friends can publish a slightly more detailed remembrance of their dead than the regular obits will afford.“...she retired as Head Nurse from University Hospital after 30 years. She was a 45 year member of Palomar Chapter of Order of Eastern Star and a 26 year member of Kearny Mesa Chapter of the Women of the Moose....” Or another woman: “We will all remember her blueberry muffins.” Sometimes these will include the method of death, a motorcycle accident at 41 or renal failure, pneumonia complications. Here’s a 24-year-old personal fitness trainer. Here is a 42-year- old liquor store clerk in Normal Heights with nine great-grandchildren.

Then there are the feature obituaries, actual short articles:

“Theodore Plueger, Julian community activist: Each Christmas season, in a tradition as familiar to Julian townsfolk as hot apple cider and cold mountain air, Theodore W. Plueger would raise his voice in song. “His trademark ‘Oh, Tannenbaum,’ sung in German at the annual tree-lighting ceremony on Main Street, often set the tone for a white Christmas in the rustic East County community. “

‘He sang it with such gusto,’ recalled Rosie Vanderstaay, a longtime Julian resident.‘Each time I hear that song I think of him.’...” An ex-Tribune supervisor who spent 35 years in the composing room at that paper died after a long battle with cancer. His wife had only this to say in the article: “We went everywhere but a few Midwestern states. In the winter we would head south, and in the summer north.” That was it. That’s all she could come up with? The man was only 66, but still, after a few years of cancer, hardly snatched from the jaws of life. One would think she might have had time to compose at least a more illuminating epitaph for publication, if not a more poignant one.

And take 54-year-old Dr. B. “...Humanitarian. Dentist. Gay.

“In those words and in that order — that is the way friends remembered the man who worked decades to further the social, political and economic causes of gays and lesbians.”

Fred Baker, 77, vice president of Thearle Music Co., “...helped organize and produce one of the company’s major annual events: a piano festival that featured as many as 200 amateurs playing simultaneously in Balboa Park.”

It is remarkable sometimes for what we are remembered, what, in the end, there is to be said. When I go, will my obituary read, “He was a size 48 regular. He used a lot of adjectives. In 1989, while researching an article about San Diego motorcycle clubs, he was initiated into the Ugly Motherfuckers of America”?

In the daily newspaper pages that observe our dead I find little note of any true meaning that that person’s existence may have imparted to those around him. The closest I have found is the comment “We will all remember her blueberry muffins,” because the single sentence is pregnant with love and loss. “He was a 55-year member of the Optimists Club” is chilling by comparison.

Where, in these listings, are remembrances like, “A grade-school teacher for 27 years, Ms. X probably taught 1000 human beings to read and thereby saved them from God knows what kind of hopelessness”? Or,“Bob Finkle was a quiet and patient man and you could learn a thing or two about patience just by standing in line with him at the bank on Fridays”?

“We have not been...picked out...simply to be abandoned...set loose to find our own way....We are entitled to some direction...I would have thought.” — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

The funeral service for 93-year-old Mr. Rodriguez at Holy Spirit Catholic Church on 55th Street in East San Diego is attended by a large number of people. Handsome, elderly men with chiseled noses greet neighbors, relatives, and churchmembers like barrio statesmen. The women in the family look like various versions of Joan Baez, with either long black hair or short gray cuts, most with fine, broad cheekbones and remarkable black eyes that project warmth and strength. A very attractive and large family closing ranks around death as though they’d done it many times before.

The cremated remains of Mr. Rodriguez are in a silver box etched with a laurel design and his full family name, the date of his birth in 1905, and that of his death in March 1999. The box, about a foot square, rests on a pedestal in front of the communion rail. In it are reflected the faces of the hundred or so who approach, presumably in a state of grace, to accept the body of Christ.

The hymn selections are led by a congregation member, a slight-shouldered, waspish man with a mediocre voice. No one seems familiar with the tunes and though, at first, there is a half-hearted attempt to follow along, soon it is a showcase performance from the pulpit that celebrates the triumph of the singer’s confidence in his own voice over the plebeian concerns of vocal skill. Several such hymns follow and the attendants at Mass are left standing, clearing their throats, peering at the hymnals with reading glasses, and leafing through pages to keep up.

The children are well behaved as most Hispanic children are in what they perceive to be inscrutable, grown- up activities. Once outside, they play tag or hide-and- seek around the common area between the church and their school, reveling in their excused absence that day. The women stay together, speaking in both Spanish and English about coffee and pan dulce at one of their homes after the interment at Holy Cross Cemetery. The older men shake hands with each other, nod, and speak in short, formal phrases. The younger women eye the younger men critically from across the parking lot, commenting disparagingly on the T-shirts and baggy pants, the lack of ties, the profusion of cigarettes. Those young men are in an animated discussion about auto parts for a 1974 Ford Maverick.

Death here is not an intrusion on anything; it is accommodated almost seamlessly into the rhythm of the workweek, the ordinary concerns of shopping and food preparation, transportation, the employment situation, soccer, and taxes. I am, for the most part, ignored. Not out of any deliberate coolness, but in response to my complete irrelevance. I am neither family nor from the neighborhood. If my presence is not an affront, it may have more to do with my tentative genuflections, my sign of the cross, and my awkward turning to those around me during Mass for a brief shaking of hands, a nod, a smile, a communion in something, if only mortality and some half-defined hope of transcendence.

“Ordinary and inevitable death, death as an actual part of life, has become so rare that when it occurs among us it reverberates like a handclap in an empty auditorium.” — Michael Lesy, The Forbidden Zone

The bells are tolling electronically from the tower of the La Jolla Presbyterian Church chapel on Draper Avenue in La Jolla. Following the decay of the last bell striking eleven o’clock, solo singer Barbara Tobler, a strikingly pretty redheaded, fair-skinned, and solid-looking woman, weaves her voice over the great pipe organ to Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. Her voice is rich, trained, moving. Those in attendance this Friday morning are well dressed, some of them casually, but, I venture, expensively so. Seated in the front rows, the immediate family of Edith “Tippy” Saxon-Wedgeworth (not, of course, her real name, but something like it) seem tired but calm, accepting, possibly relieved, and I notice they all like each other and appear grateful for each other’s company.

It strikes me as unlikely that I will, in the normal course of things, ever know someone with a name like Tippy Saxon-Wedgeworth. With the exception of a three-year stint as bar manager of a South Bay yacht club where I met people with last names like Knox and nicknames like Luvvy, these people might as well exist on Mars for all of my experience. It will, I am fairly sure, be a challenge to get a sense of the humanity of this 86-year-old La Jollan, someone who moved in circles beyond my ken. I am wrong.

After Tobler’s Bach rendition, the electronic tower bells strike a stately “Amazing Grace” that can be heard for blocks: from the Cove, I imagine, to the pump house; from, say, Pearl Street, if faintly, to 100 yards or so out to sea. The old spiritual wafts through the late morning air, reverberates in the church, then gives way to silence.

The Death of the Virgin by Caravaggio

The Reverend John Watson reads: “From David, King of Israel: God’s our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble and therefore we will not fear...says the Lord, ‘She who believes in me, though she were dead, yet she shall live. And who- ever lives and believes in me shall never die. Our meeting this morning is in loving memory of Edith ‘Tippy’ Saxon-Wedgeworth, born on October 28, 1913, and born into eternal life on March 14, 1999. We gather here to grieve her loss as tradition dictates. Jesus wept at the death of his friend Lazarus, and so it is appropriate and natural for us to grieve the loss of someone so esteemed and cherished as her....”

I am looking at the photo of Tippy in the “Resurrection Service” program: Edith Wedgeworth is photographed with her dog, a setter possibly — I don’t know much about dogs. She was a thin woman, seems to have had excellent posture, very well dressed in a sweater and midcalf-length print dress, her hair a high white coiflike pastry frosting, a sort of Barbara Bush thing. It is her smile that is most revealing: intelligent, engaging, knowing, and possibly mischievous. It is the kind of look that says, “I am enjoying myself and you are welcome to join me If not, that’s fine too.” It is a smile that can’t be faked well.

“Tippy Wedgeworth was a member of this church for nearly 50 years,” Watson tells us. “We are here to acknowledge her value to us...to honor Tippy, to remember some aspects of her life, to honor her creator, to celebrate her new life.... Let us come to God in prayer.... Thank you for Tippy, thank you for her life, thank you for the kind of person she was and still is in your presence....”

My mind is wandering to that PBS series with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell. Bill Moyers asked Campbell about personality surviving after death, something to the effect of, “Will we remember who we were? Will we still have a sense of our identity?” Campbell didn’t seem to think the question was that important. He sort of shrugged and guessed, “We’ll probably be too busy looking at God.” As Reverend Watson goes on speaking, I find myself hoping that Campbell’s postmortem scenario is more fun than it sounds.

“Lift each of these up into your own light and warmth which will comfort each one and sustain each one in the days to come.” Watson speaks on.“We cannot deal with this alone, so mark this service by your presence....” My thoughts are drifting again, or maybe not — maybe this is the exact appropriate time to start thinking, not about Tippy (how can I?), but about the end in general.

I had cancer once, and the most common question I was asked about it at the time was “Are you afraid to die?” I found the answer to be either yes or no depending on the time of day or night and what I had been thinking about in the period just leading up to the question. This appears to be no answer at all, but it is actually useful information. I discovered that courage comes and goes, and so does the perception of death as either a horrible snuffing out of this colorful and romantic if painful epic of experience, or as an unimaginably liberating event that defines everything that came before it. If you’re on your knees blubbering to the baby Jesus about your sins and begging for a second chance to change your ways before the switch is pulled, just wait an hour or so if you have it. You’ll probably recompose yourself, muster some dignity, cobble together some snappy last words, and present a noble picture of calm in the face of the inevitable. Just hope you go then because an hour later you’re wetting your pants and babbling again.

“...we do not pray for Tippy this morning, because she is doing better than we can imagine. We pray for this service and for each of us.... Lift us up, inspire us, encourage us....” Watson then reads from Wedgeworth’s own Bible, Psalm 27, which she had under- lined in red: “The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life, of whom shall I be afraid? ... One thing I ask of the Lord that I shall seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.... Hear, oh Lord, when I cry aloud. Be gracious and answer to me, thou has said, seek my face. My heart says to thee, thy face, Lord, do I seek. Hide not thy face from me.” The night before this service I had been reading Life After Life by Raymond Moody, the reincarnation guy. Now I have always resisted the idea of reincarnation on the basis of the peple I’ve met who do believe in it. Invariably these people were royalty in Atlantis in a previous life and never a minor functionary at the Bureau of Weights and Measures in New Jersey. Also, if it were true, why don’t we remember any of it? As I’ve gotten older I’ve become willing to let this second objection slide since I rarely recall anything I did last Tuesday. But the question of fear comes up again, not so much in terms of painful death throes, but judgment. A woman who had a near- death experience is quoted in Life After Life.

“‘You are shown your life — and you do the judging.... You are judging yourself. You have been forgiven all your sins, but are you able to forgive yourself for not doing the things you should have done and some little cheating things that maybe you’ve done in life? Can you forgive yourself? This is the judgment.’

”Here, I am in trouble again. Just take, for example, the time I’ve wasted watching Walker, Texas Ranger! — Not to mention certain dealings with Southland Collections and Repos- sessions.... No, I find little comfort in this idea.

“I did not know Tippy Wedgeworth,” admits Watson, “but I did get to pray with her and read her the scriptures shortly before she passed into glory. I asked her to grip my hand when she understood and appreciated what I was trying to read. She never let go. She never stopped gripping and I took that to mean she was with the Lord in her final hours. Speaking for her now, Cheryll, Tom, and David.”

Watson has introduced Wedgeworth’s daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. Cheryll Calder is a middle-aged woman, very self-possessed and well groomed. Her voice is that of a young girl.

“Mother, I hope this will do,” she announces. This is met by laughter at what I assume is a private joke among those who knew the woman.“I think La Jolla has lost one of its characters. She was a rather opinionated lady and many people had differences with her, but she could always say she was sorry, which is a wonderful attribute...she loved to tell a joke on herself...she gave me a tremendous love of reading and writing. She loved young people, and I always told her she should hang her shingle out because she would love to give advice. She kept in touch with all of her grandchildren and was vitally interested in them, and she was proud of you kids and loved you all...at the end when Mother couldn’t get around she had some pretty special guardian angels. Lynn, thank you...you gave my mother three...wonderful years.” Here Calder’s voice breaks but she rallies quickly. “Mother’d get mad at her, fire her... Lynn would walk out the back door and she’d come in the front door, and this would go on and on.”

Her voice is trembling but she is smiling. Those seated are chuckling with her. “Thank you, Lynn, and thank you to the community of friends who reached out and loved her.”

Tippy’s daughter reminds everyone that her mother was the recording secretary for a ladies’ investment group formed in the 1950s called “the Mints. I think, in the beginning, Mother’s idea of an investment was a sale at I. Magnin.” Calder then reads from a selection of the collected minutes of Mints’ meetings as recorded by Tippy.

“On November 14th, les girls, looking terribly chic, gathered at the Honker for lunch. This was our attempt to capture a light mood and avoid the weighty problems of finance. Frankly, this is where we shine: in the fine art of eating and drinking and it is where our field of endeavor should lie. Let the ticker tape roll on and why not admit we’re more social than bearish!

“The chief flunky was somewhat dismayed by this avalanche of women as he had two tables for ten reserved by three different people.... I think he heaved a sigh of relief when he finally seated us all at one table — more or less isolated from his more classy customers.... [We] asked for separate checks....

“So we downed our martinis, purred over our food, and gossiped continuously — having a whale of a time...quite a few of us who would like to see this fading financial venture turn into a bridge club and/or just plain ‘stitch and bitch’ club....

“After ten trips to the cash register to bring back change for each person, our waiter went out in the back alley and shot himself! — Meeting adjourned, Tippy.”

Wow. This is a glimpse into a life as unlike my own as that of a Tennessee share- cropper or a professional wrestler. I want to know more about this person and this life. I make a mental note to ask her daughter if she has any more “Mints Minutes.” It turns out she does, and after her husband, Sam, invites me to their home in La Jolla for a reception following the service (extraordinary, I think, since I am a complete stranger) he takes my address and he later sends me “Tippy Wedgeworth’s Pulitzer Prize Winning Minutes of the Early Mints Meetings.”

The green spiral-bound book contains remarkable entries everywhere with pas- sages such as “This was a dismal meeting — full of figures all going down — and not a shred of scandal was spoken. Ah me — I shall now try and rehash Barbara’s able analysis of our holdings: Let’s get to the point: As of today, we are each $76.46 in the hole!” Another: “Financial talk dwindled to diaper service talk as Grandma Nichols was expecting her grandchild. Cordy outdid herself with fancy tea sandwiches and cake to go with the Bloody Marys. Later a short session of bridge and that’s the meeting.” Many of these are concluded with sign-offs like,“Vaguely yours,” “Well — toodle ooh, girls. The market will probably go lower but it can’t get hotter!” Or “Love and xx’s” or “Puddles of Passion,” or “Ever thine.”

These people appear to have existed in some parallel dimension of demigods where dialogue is scripted by Noël Coward and the action is blocked out by Somerset Maugham. I long to move among them, exchange quips with Tippy as I languidly tap the ash from my cigarette in its ivory holder and fondle my ascot. Tippy’s world seems like fun and Tippy seems a benevolent, witty presence moving through it. Undoubtedly her life did not always resemble a black-and-white comedy of manners from the 1930s, but the tinted snapshots like those above that she provided in her writing as a legacy for her family and friends are, if a kind of fiction, a kindness nonetheless and a creative one.

Tippy’s funeral ends with Barbara Tobler singing “Morning Has Broken.” I think that a Cat Stevens song is an odd choice for a woman of Tippy’s generation, and the thing is so well sung by Tobler, I almost fail to see the notation that it is actually an old Celtic folksong. This leads me to speculation about the origins of “Peace Train” and “Moon Shadow,” though I say nothing of this as I speak with the minister at the rear of the church. He is describing his book-in-progress written for “people who believe in God but don’t go to church.” I want to pursue the subject, thinking it a good one, but he is obliged to mingle with the congregation.

I decline the invitation to the reception, generous as it is (I imagine mimosas and crab puffs) and eat at a pancake place on Girard instead. Over pecan waffles I read the day’s obituaries.

A large number of men with long naval careers seem to be passing away now from cancer. I wonder if it has anything to do with exposure to nukes, the sun, or Navy Exchange prices for cigarettes. This confirms my early decision that a military career would have been an unhealthy choice. My opting for an employment history of musician, bartender, and writer seems, once again, sound.

At Warwick’s I look at a copy of On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, examine The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud, Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. Every- where I look I see books with death or dying in the title: A Happy Death, A Death in the Family, Death of a Salesman, Dead Souls, As I Lay Dying, Dead Elvis, Who Dies? The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Death in the Afternoon, etc. I purchase a copy of Jessica Mitford’s book The American Way of Death. I take it home where I am surrounded with mystery novels with titles like The Deadly Piece, Dead Man’s Dance, Deadly Weapon, The Death of Me Yet, Death and the Good Life, The Courtesy of Death. Here’s The Church of Dead Girls by Stephen Dobyns, Sex, Death and God in L.A. edited by David Reid, even one by Martin Amis called Dead Babies. This is ridiculous, I have plenty of books without death in the title, I must have. ... The Big Sleep, Killing Time, All These Condemned, The Last Good Kiss, Killer’s Choice, Final Payments, Last Rites, Cold in July, Fine and Private Place, Our Lady of Darkness, Shadows on the Grass, The Long Goodbye, You’ve Had Your Time, Lie Down in Darkness, The Deep Blue Good-by, The Curious Facts Preceding My Execution, What Dreams May Come, Perchance to Dream, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and my favorite title, Charles Willeford’s Kiss Your Ass Goodbye. My mother was right. Almost everything in my collection seems charged with some morose connotation: Just Before Dark, Meetings at the Edge, Watchers at the Straight Gate, The Summing Up, Watcher in the Shadows, The Black Corridor. Even the novel Kirk Douglas signed to me, Dance with the Devil, or Tim Powers’s Last Call — all fraught with menace. I set the Mitford book on top of my cholesterol test results and feel butter and pancake syrup clogging my arteries. I put on the television; Dead Pool with Clint Eastwood is on. Open-heart surgery on the Discovery channel, John Lennon’s assassination on VH1, Casper the Friendly Ghost on some cartoon channel, Princess Di on Biography, an infomercial for workout equipment featuring lean, muscular youths wearing tight clothes and desperate rictus grins as they work their arms and legs frantically like there’s a hellhound on their heels. Kris Kristofferson is being interviewed on E! My God, he looks terrible! Looks like he might beat Bob Hope to Forest Lawn. Nothing on television but fatalities, termi- nal cases, the twin shadows of death and destruction, the dry whisper of the grim reaper like rats’ feet over bro- ken glass, intimations of mortality, a weary and comic and inept, vain, futile, stale, and profitless rehearsal for the Big Dirt Nap — nothing but that and golf.

I’ve learned that when synchronicity gangs up on you, there is nothing you can do about it. There is no escape. My guitar case looks like a coffin. The flowers on the patio look funereal, some- thing for a mausoleum, ...the pack of cigarettes next to the ashtray, the row of video- cassettes beneath the strobing eye of the television with titles like In a Lonely Place, Beat the Devil, Mystery Train, Love and Death, The Unforgiven, Mortal Thoughts...

Entering the acceptance phase of my mood I pick up the Mitford book. In it, she writes, “Oh grave, where is thy victory? Where, indeed. Many a badly stung survivor, faced with the after- math of some relative’s funeral, has ruefully concluded that the victory has been won hands down by a funeral establishment.”

Why fight it? I set the book down next to my cholesterol and tread- mill/stress-test results and pick up the sheets given to me by Arthur C. Mitchell, embalmer’s license # 7248. After the visitation of Mr. B. at the Beardsley-Mitchell Funeral Home, Mr. Mitchell answered my inquiries with a sympathetic and apprais- ing look. With a gesture that seemed to say, “No rush, but no time like the present. Take your time, but not too much time, time and tide wait for no man, we have heard the chimes at midnight,” he handed me the General Price List to review at my leisure

THESE PRICES ARE EFFECTIVE FEBRUARY 04, 1999, BUT ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE:

1. Basic Professional Services of Funeral Direc- tor and Staff: taxes, licenses, utilities, and business expenses, preparation and filing of necessary permits, consultation with the clergy, cemetery, crematory, or common carrier, assistance with insurance papers, planning the funeral or memorial service and placement of the obituary notice...$1,465.00 2. Embalming...$310 3. Other Care of the Deceased: A. Dressing, Casketing and Cosmetology...$150 B. Preparation of body for ID Viewing (up to one hour)...$200 C. Washing and disinfection of Unembalmed Remains...$100 D. Dressing and Casketing Only...$100 4. Directing Services and Use of Facilities: A. Use of Facility for Visitation and Services (includes one visitation period until 7 P.M.)...$210 B. One hour private viewing...$85

Another 12 sheets follow with additional charges. For example: “Graveside Service, $325; Service in facility other than Funeral Home, $355; Overtime charges for Staff (Saturday/Sunday/Holidays), $125; Sheltering or refrigeration per day or portion thereof, $250; Scatter or Burial of Cremated Remains at Sea, $85; Probate Processing Fee, $350; Flower Van and Driver, $110.” It goes on.

The above says nothing of the price of caskets. At Beardsley-Mitchell you can pay from $125 for a child’s coffin all the way up to $25,000. A rental casket is $695. Also, say you need an “Air Tray for Casketed remains (required by airlines),” that will run you $95. A “Combination Shipping Unit (required by airlines),” whatever that may be, is $175. A “Total Traditions Cremation Service with Cremation Casket” is listed as between $2205 and $26,995.

The Casket Price List makes you think about your options and whether you’re ready to make that financial commitment to your eternal reward. A “State Herculite (Cloth Covered Wood)” with a “White Crepe Interior” and you’re looking at $785. Or you can go with the J&S Allen model, black, with a white crepe interior for $500. A child’s “#20 Oval Pink Lamb Skin Exterior” with “Pink Crepe Interior,” we’re talking $275. There is a final option, listed alone, under “Alternative Containers” and that is a “Cardboard Box” for a flat $75 — if you act now! Remember, prices are subject to change without notice.

Thinking I’ll obviously go with cremation, I peruse the Urn Price List and grab a pen. The “Royal Blue Cloisonné ” sounds nice for $395. I picture friends and relatives asking the surviving custodian of my earthly remains, “Where’s John?” And the reply,“Oh, he’s in the Cloisonné.”

Of course there is the “Pieta” for $595 or the “Polished Dolphins” for $695, but couldn’t I really do with the “Fredericksburg Cherry” for $295 or the classic “Teak Bell Jar” for a mere $195?

Actually, I have already discussed this matter, I now remember, with my girl- friend. It has been decided that my ashes will be placed in the Thermos I bought her for Valentine’s Day. When her time comes, the carbonized remains of that great rack will join me. We call it “Our Thermos of Love.”

“ — it’s not gasps and blood and falling about — that isn’t what makes it death. It’s just a man failing to reappear, that’s all — now you see him, now you don’t, that’s the only thing that’s real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back — an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.” — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

This flyer from Beardsley-Mitchell has really got me thinking about the whole thing now. How do I envision my own funeral or memorial service? First of all, there will be no “viewing.” I intend to look pretty bad and I’ve made real progress in this area already. I would like a combination memorial service and concert, something like Woodstock or better yet, Altamont would be good with a few births and at least one death besides my own. But I realize this is unlikely, realistically speaking.

No, just renting an Elks Club hall or a conference room at a hotel in Mission Valley (one near the bar) would be okay. I would like friends or family members to read from my body of work, something perhaps from the series I did on the county supervisors’ race in 1992 or the hot air balloon battle scene from my science fiction novel in the ’80s. I would naturally like any surviving members of the Troy Dante Inferno to perform “Fire” by Arthur Brown if that is possible, but only after a suitable period of weeping.

The music would be important. If live music is not practical, I think I’ll take a cue from my mother. She recently told me that she is recording her own vocal onto karaoke tracks of “What I Did for Love” from A Chorus Line and the title song from Cabaret. These are to be played at her service. Her choices, I assume, make sense to her and naturally we will honor her wishes just as I hope those I leave behind will honor my choices: Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration (the whole thing, you guys!) and (at the moment I’m leaning toward) the theme from Shaft.

As for last words, I doubt you often have much control over what they might be. For every Oscar Wilde’s reported “Either the wall- paper goes or I do,” or Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud,” I’ll bet you have a hundred folks who just say “shit.” Even one of the most quoted guys ever, George Santayana, the one who said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (I always thought that should be accompanied by “Those who hear this quote are condemned to repeat it”) is supposed to have uttered on his deathbed, “Tell them I said something.” In view of this I have taken the precaution of writing my last words on the back of a Rite-Aid receipt for vitamin E and Just For Men. It is folded in half and is in between my Blockbuster card and Pure Platinum membership card. If you find the Lotto ticket with the writing on the back that says, “Thanks for being a good sport, sorry about your shirt — Dr. Dean,” it is the wrong thing.