Notes towards an obituary

Posted on October 29, 2004 in Sorrow & Regret Whines

I’m not dead yet. I’m not planning to kill myself. A meteor falling through the ceiling would not be unwelcome by me, but I am not going to buy a gun or sharpen a kitchen knife. Instead, I spent a few hours this morning making notes towards an obituary, what might be said about me should I die suddenly.

Read on at the risk of nausea, contempt, or pity.

• A man is usually summed up by his accomplishments. Let us speak of this one by his remnants which are notebooks, a weblog, and some unfinished art projects.
• He loved, to be sure, but his love was the love an outsider feels looking through windows at the pretty parties of others.
• Though he often gave of himself for good causes, was quick to praise the strengths of others, and believed that even with their faults they were people worth knowing and good, he often felt alone among them. “I have this mind unlike most others,” he said. “It’s limited. It doesn’t do math or learn foreign languages well but it dances.” Some called him proud or arrogant: he wasn’t either of these. “What have I accomplished?” he’d say. Writing resumes was impossible for him because he didn’t think he ever held a job that let him be his best and he didn’t want to sell the fruits of what he loved to do lest weevils find it and take the cotton from the boll.
• He often heard that his metaphors were obscure.
• It hurt him when he made or did things for friends only to see them mocked for imperfections. He gave to others and felt the lack of reciprocity dearly. You could often count on him to be there when someone was treating you unjustly: he could not abide a silence in the presence of calumny. But predators often noticed that he seldom stood up for himself. “It is ever so much easier to stand up for someone else than for yourself,” he offered in explanation of his unhappiness with his treatment in the world. He saved more than a few egos by attracting maliciousness to himself. The cruel quickly learned that they could not belittle his wife without response from him, but that they could freely belittle him.
• Every now and then, he did stand up for himself by walking away from bad situations into no situation at all.
• When he was young, his family often told him what a waste he was. In later years, they simply denied the tortures they’d perpetrated and he became estranged from them. His mother expected that he honor her by dedicating all his books to her. This put a cramp in his desire to publish because he could not honestly say that she or anyone else in the family motivated or understood him. Sterility and anxiety denied him the joy of having his own family: about this he ached. It angered him when he heard others complain about their children because they had what he could not.
• “You are your own worst enemy” was a phrase he took too closely to heart.
• Because he didn’t have a successful business, a higher degree, or a string of publications, people were quick to dismiss him.
• It is true that he had a firey temper, but he employed it mostly when he heard people maligning third parties. If you attacked him directly, he didn’t argue: blame for bad interactions could often be laid at his door and he would take these orphans in, giving them plenty of milk for their strength.
• He would take almost any criticism even when he knew it did not reflect him.
• Outsiders often received a compassionate ear from him. He did not hate immigrants because he remembered that he himself was not all that far removed from them and he himself felt a stranger in a strange land. What he could not tolerate were insiders, such as Fundamentalists, who believed themselves cruelly beset. To these he’d ask “Where are the lions? Where are the death squads?” His knowledge of inner pain led him to champion human rights and respect for diversity. But he also wanted his diversity respected, which was not often the case.
• He could be unbearable in conversation because he spent so much time alone. This he knew and marked as a flaw.
• Despite what others said about his ego, Joel believed that others had great gifts that he could not hope to have for himself. “There are many kinds of intelligence,” he’d say as he spoke of the wonder of the things others could do with their hands or minds.
• Those with a platform could count on him to listen to their lectures. Even when people misrepresented him or projected their own shortcomings on him because he was male, American, “intellectual”, or a deadbeat, he never called them stupid, though he moaned about others not getting the obvious. “Smart people can believe things that are dead wrong,” he’d often say. “I’m probably not an exception.”
• There was, in all his endeavors, the desire to break through the wall of misunderstanding. People teased him a lot, perhaps because they thought that because he was tall he could take more. He lost many friends when the jokes became too much and he exploded. He wanted to die on the spot after the pressures got the better of him: when this happened, he’d consciously avoid sharp objects and potential poisons; and ask others to drive for him.
• Joel mistrusted himself. When asked what he thought of other people, he’d might admit that they frustrated him. But inside, a second hand wrote that the problem was entirely himself. Sticking up for himself seemed like a constant drain on his energies so he avoided it by retreating. Emily Dickinson served as a model of retreat from the world for him. It is how he kept writing.
• To the question, “What do you do for a living” he would answer “I’m a domestic parasite.”
• His praise for his wife was both fulsome and sincere. He believed that she deserved better than him.
• That no one called him to do things with him, that he was often the initiator and the organizer troubled him. I can’t be very much fun, he’d say. And he’d leave it at that.