"I Don't Do Frief"
Queenan, Joe
"I Don't Do Gri* ef" While Baby Boomers rest-in-peace, their funerals have become Hell-on-Earth BY JOE QUEENAN hen I was a very young man, there was a popular witticism that made the rounds...
...It must be recalled that ever since the bloodbath known as the Sixties, Baby Boomers have lived in constant fear of anything that threatens to be a downer, a bad scene, or what is technically known as "a drag...
...Or death...
...Because we Baby Boomers believe in nothing, we end up acting like we believe in everything...
...ver the course human higto i W, most societies wisely developed a priestly class whose job it was to preside over important rituals-many of them unpleasant--and say what needed to be said in words that would offend the smallest number of people...
...he makes the most extraordinaryfaC'alle...
...Another unfortunate Baby Boomer contribution to the mortuary arts is the theologically eclectic funeral service...
...n my perhaps outmoded view, for a ~ funeral to truly work two things are necessary...
...he has shared...
...Then I find that he's up there looking down on us...
...Since my friend died, I have attended any number of honest, emotional, personal funerals, most of them so foolish they made my blood run cold...
...No, he's stone dead, so get used it...
...Unsurprisingly, the search for a death that everyone else can live with has already turned into an industry in some parts of America...
...At a ScottishAmerican wedding I attended, the couple made the woeful decision to invite a bagpipe player to the ceremony, where his baleful rendition of "Amazing Grace" created an ambiance not unlike the scene in Braveheart where Mel Gibson gets drawn and quartered...
...A nation in which grown men say things like "I am not a happy camper" at momentous junctures is manifesdy not the Shining City on the Hill that our forefathers dreamed about...
...But for a dead person to get the send-offhe deserves, at least one person actually has to break down and cry...
...It has long been my belief that people should be buried in the rites of the religion least likely to embarrass them...
...Contrary to Billy Joel's predictably inaccurate assertion that "we didn't start the fire" Baby Boomers fervently believe that they did, in fact, start the fire, that the world was an incoherent mess before they got here...
...I sneered at the service's generic quality, lamenting its dependence on hollow, formulaic rituals...
...And once, I sat and watched a videotape of a wedding in which the bride and groom showed the audience a video depicting their lives before they met each other...
...And the term"vulnerable" can mean anything from "probably gay" to "read way too much Sylvia Plath in college ." Equally exasperating is the reliance on such unwieldy terms as "cocooning," "matrixing," "mentoring," "nesting," "plateauing," and "parenting," the proliferation of which marks the first time in human history that an entire society has been overpowered by gerunds . Bill Clinton is a master of gerundification, issuing proclamations such as "We are growing the economy," while secretly reminding himself: "My incessant partying with interns is impacting Hillary's mood-or maybe she's just PMSing ." Early on, Boomers mastered the ancient art of incantatory banality, pummeling the nation into submission through the quasi-monastic repetition of such inane expressions as "poster child," "style over substance," "on the same page," "edgy," and a wide assortment of nouns modified by the all-purpose idiocy o "the mother of all...
...Our parents and their parents and everyone's parents were brought up to believe that when a child dies, the whole universe screams...
...Jesus Christ Almighty, what is it with you...
...The Baby Boomer desecration of funerals is a subject that has not been accorded the attention it deserves...
...This is not good...
...On Saturday, July 8, 2000, newspapers all over America carried reports of the death of Cory Erving, the eighteen-year-old son of basketball immortal Julius Erving...
...or another perspective on the way NN~I~:~N~ my generation has retooled this civilization, let us examine the way Baby Boomers handle tragedy...
...Instead of raging against the dying of the light, we are happy for closure...
...With all due respect to Erving, this vacuous statement is quintessential Boomer blather...
...I wished the service had been more honest, emotional, and personal...
...Most of them did a fairly good job under the circumstances...
...Between the nitwit eulogist, the farewell home video, the flatulent sign-off music, and the inappropriate clothing, funerals have devolved from sacred bonding rituals into commedia dell'am farces...
...In The Sixth Sense, Bruce Willis plays a dead psychiatrist who cannot report to The Afterlife for reassignment until he has atoned for a disastrous patient diagnosis that in fact led to his own demise...
...He ain't dead...
...But because Baby Boomers are all over the lot philosophywise, I have often had to attend services where the various liturgies not only war with each other but sometimes cancel one another out...
...He added:"We have learned a lot from this tragedy, and we will be a stronger family as a result...
...Don't you know that this is an indifferent universe, where life is meaningless and death even more so...
...They are cabaret...
...Last year, I attended a service where two middieaged men were wearing New York Giants windbreakers...
...Two, the Giants finished 6-10 that season and didn't even make the playofl...
...The lesson to be learned is simple: If you don't care enough about the dearly departed to put on a suit and a tie, then stay home...
...This always gets things off to a good start...
...They entail light shows, production numbers, props...
...I was also at a wedding reception where the groom's workingclass family kept threatening to mug the culturally marooned string quartet unwisely hired for the occasion...
...Most important, they invariably showcase a cavalcade of material-strapped wiseguy eulogists who transform what should be a serious ritual into National Mortuary Open-Mike Night...
...But one also senses a fundamental resentment of the arbitrariness of the universe...
...I want you to promise me that when I die, if anyone gets up at my funeral and mentions the I Ching, the Bhagavad-Gita, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or if anyone even so much as suggests that I am not dead but have just transmuted myself into another form of energy, or if anyone implies that I was just chomping at the bit to meet my Maker, that I felt a tremor of bliss, that in those last weeks and months I almost seemed to be letting go, then please take this baseball bat and break their legs.And if anyone dares to mention the word 'sutra' at my funeral you have my permission to kill them...
...In What Lies Beneath, it's a murdered coed seeking revenge...
...King Lear, we are not...
...Obviously, much of what the clerical class had to say was nonsense, but for the first five thousand years of recorded histoIT this didn't seem to bother anyone...
...Baby Boomers seem incapable of under2 standing that people attending funerals generally share the same emotions, making it unnecessary for twelve different people to say how much they are going to miss the creature in the casket or urn...
...Of course, there are always those who make a point of never attending funeral services, because, as they so cleverly put it, "I don't do grief...
...Not surprisingly, their most important work was done at funerals...
...This is doubly true for Cleveland Browns fans...
...He has beguiled the mourners with his witty repartee and a tasteful assortment of colorful anecdotes...
...Specifically, they had to throw the Past overboard...
...And one way to accomplish this is through memorable, upbeat funerals...
...I am not suggesting that we need to go overboard, with the rending of clothing and the tearing of hair and the gnashing of teeth...
...Just have fun with it...
...That's probably because so much time and energy have gone into ridiculing Baby Boomer weddings...
...Getting closure was very important to the family in coping with the loss...
...they were funny, tender, warm, affectionate...
...And the Past cannot fight back...
...Start with the lingo...
...lenged" instead of "stupid," "downsize" instead of "fire") ; sometimes because Baby Boomers like the sound of a word even though they can only guess at its meaning ("hubris," "gravitas," "sutra," "epiphany," "au naturel") ; sometimes because it enables the speaker to briefly masquerade as someone who actually knows what he's talking about ("vertical integration," "validate," "facilitate") . Because Baby Boomers are the only team players with hands-on experience in this type of prioritized interfacing, the rest of society finds it difficult to verbalize, contextualize, or stay on message, since the mind-set they grew up with has in a very real sense ceased to be proactively user-friendly...
...Upon receiving this horrible news, Julius Erving issued the following statement: "We are thankful to the Seminole County Sheriff's Office for bringing Cory back to us...
...Between 1998 and the summer of 2000, no fewer than six major ghost movies were released by Hollywood...
...It is no secret that Baby Boomers have a hard time dealing with death...
...They feature subprofessional singers who seemingly scour the obituaries looking for a chance to cackle "Forever Young" or "Wind Beneath MyWings" over the open casket of a person who obviously had no idea what he was getting into when he died...
...But no, everyone has to get up and thank the dead person for "being there...
...But no, he has to push the envelope...
...First, despite the fact that this is a rigorously nonsectarian service, he has to get in a lime dig at the Creator...
...He has opened his heart...
...Although Boomers are aware that something loosely identified as the Past exists, they have devoted most of their adult lives to pretending that it does not...
...Cool" was my son's reply...
...So hey, everybody, let's keep it light...
...None of them are in the same class as Susan Sarandon...
...And it's only going to get worse as more Boomers pass from the scene...
...First off, a modicum of respect must be shown...
...But no, Baby Boomers have decided otherwise: The universe may seem a smidgen incoherent on first glance, but if you roll up your sleeves and attack the problem energetically you can vastly simplify your life...
...In other words, I had to sit in a chair for forty-five minutes and watch a videotape in which a bunch of people I did not know sat down and watched a second videotape...
...Now I dread them because they're terrible...
...For them, e-funerals should do very well indeed...
...For one, it's tasteless and shows a lack of breeding...
...When the term "high maintenance" is used to describe a woman, it can mean anything from "sensitive" to "high-strung" to "coke-snorting bitch...
...Put some more scented oil on the stiff...
...They never could have handled the 54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 June 2001 onerous demands of the Black Death: "So much bubonic plague, so little time...
...The deceased had recently recovered from a long illness and was now on the mend...
...Now all he needs to do is to get off the stage...
...If your first wedding turns out to be a disaster, you can always make up for it the second time around...
...Maybe it's time for funeral directors to start vetting these speeches...
...The result is one of the worst innovations in the history of remorse: the tag-team eulogy...
...The Past is nothing more than a series of incomprehensible mistakes, inhabited by people of dubious taste and questionable judgment who do not measure up as human beings when compared to such remarkable people as, say, us...
...iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii "~{i~i~i~i{i~i{!i!i~!i!{i~J~i~J~i~i{i ~ ~',~!{i{i{i{{i{i...
...he's just mellow...
...They believed that you could learn important things from your forebears: Refrain from sticking your hands in a roaring fire, never let small children play on Mount Vesuvius, think twice before declaring war on the Roman Empire...
...In 1987, after a good friend died a particularly hideous death, I wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times complaining about his funeral service...
...Second, it is necessary for at least one person to admit that he is actually going to miss the dead person...
...He had a new job that he genuinely enjoyed...
...terribly sad...
...Via determinations such as this, Baby Boomers are incessantly heaping derision on the Past in order to justify their fatuous innovations in the Present...
...For example, when Baby Boomers use the term "centered" to describe a child, it can mean anything from "has scads of grade-A munis in his trust fund" to "takes less drugs than his peers...
...But one aspiring Mark Antony had to opt for Door Number Three...
...I am sure they can be found in Northern California...
...In Stir of Echoes, a raped and strangled teen refuses to evacuate the house where she was murdered until her killers have been brought to justice...
...What kind of message does that send to the kids...
...But in the end, there is only so much damage that can be done at weddings, because half of them end in divorces anyway...
...Caitlin has ballet...
...This is also true of the words "unique/' remarKaoie, amazing, asmnlsnlng, "wise" and "awesome" all of which have been mercilessly overused by Baby Boomers in an effort to create an arcadian verbal reality that is entirely unsupported by the facts...
...in Sleep), Hollow, it's a headless ghost seeking his head...
...Here I am talking about contemporary funeral attire...
...A police visit or lake dredging or autopsy brings us resolution...
...Convinced of their eloquence, unbending in their belief that they had something to say that nobody else had ever thought of before, Boomers decided that religious figures needed to be purged from the funeral ceremony, or at least marginalized...
...If it is not possible for the mother, children, or significant other to do this, I suggest that survivors start hiring official mourners to provide an aura of grief at funerals...
...One would have thought that the Final Solution, the rape of Nanking, the Mongol invasions, the fall of the Roman Empire, and just about all of human history would have given Baby Boomers a hint that death can be not only a bit messy, but entirely without rhyme or reason...
...But if your funeral is a bust, you've had it.There's no such thing as a do-over...
...To personalize and take control of the death experience--much as they had earlier personalized and taken control of the urban caffeine experience---Baby Boomers have had to perform some massive retooling of human history...
...As in: "My husband is an extraordinary cook...
...Cory, who had been missing for several weeks, had finally been found dead in a pond not far from the Erving house...
...We don't have time to die this afternoon...
...Because we all know that no one's husband is actually an extraordinary cook, and because there is nothing inherent in faille that would lend itself to extraordinaritude, the word "extraordinary" has now effectively been decommissioned, purged of all meaning...
...No, that's not right, he's gone to a far, far better place...
...Or to the dead person...
...It's equally clear that Boomers are terrified by the thought of a premature, violent, or otherwise untidy demise.A glance at some recent films confirms this...
...Most of us have been at the service where Brad and Tabitha harangue the wedding party with their own analgesic vows, the words of the prophets no longer deemed quite equal to the task...
...One time I was so distraught upon returning from a spectacularly multicultural funeral that I went into my closet, yanked out a baseball bat, and handed it to my fourteenyearold son...
...Then along came the Baby Boomers...
...One funeral I attended featured nine different eulogist headliners...
...What a jerk you were for thinking you were finally getting your act together...
...First, I'm told that my friend is .just another form of energy...
...They don't like somber funeral services with dim lights and organ music because such grim rituals create the sense that...well...did somebody just die in here or what...
...Gord, I want you to make me a promise" I said...
...The assumption being that the dead party wouldn't want to do anything to depress his friends...
...They are pardes, fun-fests, or what used to be known as happenings...
...Late in the last millennium, I listened with amusement as an announcer on a New York classical music station rattled off a list of all the massively overplayed compositions he would like to see put into the deep freeze : Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Orff's Carmina Burana, etc . Though these pieces possessed varying degrees of value in purely musical terms-Mozart,Vivaldi, and Strauss clearly outgunned the hapless Orff-they had all been stripped of charm, denuded of any ability to surprise the sophisticated listener, thanks to their preposterous overuse in television commercials, movie trailers, and the programs of most American classical music stations . The announcer suggested that they be temporarily retired . THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ? June 2001 53 I feel much the same way about the semiofficial Baby Boomer lexicon.When a member of my generation wants to impress another person with the gravity of a situation, he will invariably use the word "extraordinary...
...K 58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 June 2001...
...Often I come away from these services more confused and saddened than when I went in...
...They include professionally printed programs complete with sound and lighting credits...
...One of my friends has even suggested holding two funerals for every person that dies: one for the weepy types, the other for the mourners on Prozac...
...Adopting a sort of pop Maoism they decided that society must be in a state of permanent upheaval, that its most venerable codes must be repeatedly tested, its traditions reevaluated, its rituals discarded, transmogrified, or reinvented...
...No, his spirit is breathing in the daffodils just outside the window...
...if we can get our lives running on schedule, why can't our Higher Power...
...In San Francisco, people pay $150 for a two-day workshop at the Zen Hospice to learn how to be a compassionate "death companion...
...Funeral services thus become a religious smorgasbord...
...Henceforth, garbage men wished to be called "sanitation engineers ." "Ho-ho-ho," chuckled the entire Republic, in bad need of a good laugh . It was the first time in my life that I had been exposed to the ominous powers of euphemism . It would not be the last . In the three decades since the term "sanitation engineer" slipped into the parlance of the hoi polloi, Baby Boomers have made a systematic attempt to geld the English language through a poisonous mixture of cant, jargon, blather, piffle, balderdash, and mush . Their primary siege engine has been a virulent brand of euphemism . Sometimes this is used for reasons of political correctness ("hardscrabble" instead of "crummy," "chalJOE QUEENAN has authored six previous books, is a contributing editor at GQ, and writes the column "Good Fences" for the New York Times...
...And I don't want to even talk about the inces- 0 sant "utilization" of dreary sports metaphors such as "swing for the fences," "hit a home run," and 0 "it's a slam dunk...
...Funerals are no longer somber rituals where we pay our respects to the dead...
...Funerals are another matter altogether...
...in The Haunting, it's a bunch of murdered children desperate for vindication...
...Nowhere is the fallout from this mind-set more apparent than in the treatment of tragedy...
...ii!iii!iiiii!iiiiiiiii!iii!iii!i i!iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii~ ~iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!i!iiiiiiiii: '~i i,j ii i~,i yhenlwasachild, Idreaded "ii i~i i~{ i i.~,~iiiiiiii ~' funerals because they were '~iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii...
...He was working on a raftload of exciting projects that had recently been moved off the back burner...
...He honestly believed that he had turned the corner and was very excited about what life held in store for him.Then 56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 June 2001 he died...
...Having catastrophically mistaken Bill Murray's Saturday Night Live skit about a lounge lizard funeral emcee as a viable cultural template, Baby Boomers have transformed the traditional funeral service into a ludicrous stage show: a slapdash mixture of performance art, stand-up comedy, and karaoke...
...The way Baby Boomers see it, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were incorrigible racists whose incidental contributions to the birth of this great nation are completely overshadowed by the mighty deeds of a Martin Luther King or even a Richard Gere...
...In the article, I chided the local priest for knowing so litde about my friend's background, values, hopes, dreams...
...As one alternative funeral industry bigwig told the Wall Street Journal, their clients "want to personalize and take control of the death experience...
...Personally speaking, once I've heard the sparse Quaker prayer and the lugubrious Kaddish reading and a couple of unpublished poems by some tribal elder from Manitoba, I don't have the energy left to gut out the Seventh Sutra of the Sun...
...Like many others before me, I have now learned the truth of the old saying "Be careful what you wish for...
...Though priests and rabbis and ministers and shamans and even charismatic witch doctors could sometimes rise to the occasion and wax poetic, their basic mission was to hew close to society's most treasured platitudes, providing reassurance to the grieving parties that death was part of life, that life itself had structure and purpose, that death was not a capricious, arbitrary, meaningless, or especially unpleasant event...
...it makes him sound like a chowderhead...
...The eulogist concluded this reverie with the words: "It reminds me of that old saying: If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans" This philosophical bon mot constitutes what used to be known as a "bummer" or a "bring down" The speaker has already established his personal bona tides, demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that he has standing to speak about the deceased...
...Don't you know how things work on this planet...
...But Baby Boomers are so uncomfortable with the language of grief that they have invented an official funereal twaddle for dealing with precisely such occasions.Tragedy thus becomes another opportunity for character development...
...This conflicted relationship with the English language is exemplified by the repeated use of juvenile terminology in situations where it is completely inappropriate...
...A generadon whose primary cultural artifact is the Filofax has enormous di~culty shoehorning death into its schedule: It's inconvenient, time-consuming, and stressful...
...A grown man should definitely avoid using the expression "I am not a happy camper" when discussing a matter of some import: life, death, the loss of one's job, alimony payments...
...He chose to recount a conversation he'd had with his now-departed friend shortly before he died...
...This is the way Baby Boomers process grietq they write op-ed pieces or, worse, read them...
...In fact, brain-dead vows are only part of the problem...
...innumerable classes on improving the overall quality of the death experience have sprung up...
...How Pirandellian...
...Previous generations--say, every single generation dating back to 10,000 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 2001 55 B.C.--recognized that history was a fungible resource...
...It made me long for the good old pre-postmodern days of the marriage feast at Cana, where the biggest worry was whether the hooch was going to run out...
...In each case, the dead person refuses to go to his eternal reward until things have reached a satisfactory conclusion back here on planet Earth, because any other denouement would suggest that life is meaningless and that death is capricious, haphazard, and stupid...
...The subliminal message of these motion pictures is always the same: .Just because you're dead doesn't mean you can't get your life organized...
...The Erving family will go forward from here.We have no other choice...
...Home deathing" is no longer a novelty...
...For example, a grown man should not use the term"happy camper...
...I Don't Do Gri* ef" While Baby Boomers rest-in-peace, their funerals have become Hell-on-Earth BY JOE QUEENAN hen I was a very young man, there was a popular witticism that made the rounds of this society, bringing immense amusement to the masses . Garbage men, it seemed, were no longer comfortable with the terminology traditionally used to describe them...
...This is the funeral ceremony where as 8 many as two dozen friends of the deceased c) get up in the pulpit and share their thoughts about the person being buried...
...We now have resolution...
...Shakespeare was an anti-Semite, Hemingway a homophobe, Emily Dickinson a wacko, and Mark Twain used the "N-word...
...In the course of evolution from shrubgnawing apes to Sting, societies as diverse as the Mayans, the Maoris, and the Jutes seemed to have agreed on one common point: Funerals are already depressing enough, so let's not make things worse by letting the guy who thinks he's Gallagher speak at the service...
...Society at some subconscious level seemed to recognize that even though the high priest could be dull and repetitive and verbose and even vindictive, this was still preferable to letting laymen get into the act...
...Then, whether he is aware of it or not, he goes out of his way to show disrespect for the person he has come to eulogize...
...In each of them, a human being had met with an unexpected and, in some cases, gruesome death, and was now seeking vindication, justice, or revenge...
...No matter who is being buried, this is unacceptable mourning garb...
...They involve the screening of buoyant farewell films comprising inept footage of birthday parties and college graduations that was never meant to be shown in a solemn ceremony...
...Then Baby Boomers came along...
...The Hospice even has plans to launch a program that will "certify" professional death companions, known as"midwives for death" or"mentors through dying" a role previously handled by the Mafia...
Vol. 34 • June 2001 • No. 5
