Too Soon to Say Goodbye

by Art Buchwald

  We went to church every Saturday and prayed to God that the devil wouldn’t find us.

  By the way, he didn’t look like the devil drawn by most artists, with a pitchfork and horns. My devil was a gray ghost with a face like the vicious dog next door that barked every time I came near his fence.

  Once the idea of the devil was implanted in my mind, it never left. I thought he was watching me all the time. Let me say, it was a frightening childhood.

  Everyone carries the fears of childhood into adulthood. I now eat fish and meat under duress. I watch movies and listen to jazz and don’t go to church. But there is something in me that still says I am sinning.

  When I was having sex, the devil was always at the end of my bed, muttering “Sinful, sinful, sinful.”

  The nurses at the private home in Flushing told me that the devil and God were at war. God was stern and unforgiving, they said. Nevertheless, as a child I prayed to Him every night. If I needed a favor, I would ask Him for one.

  I recall once I lost ten cents, which I had wrapped in a handkerchief intending to buy a loaf of bread. I said, “God, God, help me find it. I’ll do anything if you tell me where it is.” He didn’t tell me, and I decided the devil must have found it before I did. (Though I couldn’t figure out what he would do with bread.)

  I also talked to Him when I didn’t do my homework, or after I fell while roller skating.

  As time went on, I prayed to God less and less. I only became serious about getting His attention during World War II, when I was stationed on the Eniwetok Atoll as a Marine, loading bombs onto Corsair fighter airplanes. One night we had an air raid and the “fuckin’ Japs” (a politically correct term in those days, before they sent us Hondas, Nissans, and Nikon cameras) bombed an ammunition dump next to our tent. I buried my head down in my foxhole and cried, “God, God, I don’t want to die.”

  He must have heard me, because I am still alive.

  In my youth, God was all-powerful and could do no wrong. But when I grew up I wasn’t sure the God I was talking to was the right God. Everyone swears their own God is the only one, and if you pray to another you are an infidel, but I’m not too God-damned sure anymore.

  I am Jewish, but I am not sure what kind of Jew I am. I know I can’t handle the Orthodox Lord because there are too many rules to follow. Conservatives say there is an easier way, and they have fewer rules to obey; and the Reform Jews usually say their prayers in English.

  Since the God factor plays such an important part in the hospice, I am still waiting for a sign to tell me which God is the real one.

  I’m sure the devil is going to get mad when he reads this book.

  7

  Depression

  Many people thought I was having or would have a depression when I lost my leg and entered the hospice. I was depressed, but that was nothing compared to the episodes I experienced in 1963 and 1987.

  People ask, “Why would a funny man be depressed?”

  My answer is, “Why not?”

  Humorists (also people in show business, writers, and artists) are funny to cover up the hurts they have suffered as children. When the humor fails to work for them, they have a depression.

  In 1997 Mike Wallace and I went public about our depression on Larry King Live. Larry had one of the highest ratings ever for that segment. After the show I called Larry and said, “You have the most depressed audience on television.”

  I heard from people then, just as I do now. Some were having a depression, some had experienced a depression, and some people had a depressed family member.

  One lady said I saved her life. She had taken an overdose of pills, and my face came up on the television screen.

  I was saying, “Don’t hurt yourself. You will not only not be solving your problems, but you will be hurting the ones you love.”

  She said it was a sign and she went into the bathroom, stuck her finger down her throat, and whooped up her pills.

  A few weeks after the show I was riding in a taxi in New York and the driver said, “Weren’t you on the Larry King show talking about depression?”

  I said I was the one.

  “Do you take Prozac?”

  “No,” I said. “Do you?”

  “I don’t, but my dog does.”

  “How is he doing?” I asked.

  “He is feeling much better.”

  Mike, Bill Styron, and I went around the country addressing mental health organizations. We received plaques and awards and became poster boys for mental illness. Now I have become the poster boy for death.

  Tipper Gore gave me my favorite award at a reception in New York when she presented me with the “Lifetime Achievement Award for Depression.” It was given to me for my mantra, “Don’t commit suicide, because you might change your mind two weeks later.”

  I had two serious depressions. I was told by Bill Styron that if I had one more I would be inducted into the “Bipolar Hall of Fame.”

  The price I paid for success was that by building a wall around me, no one could penetrate my real feelings. The scars of childhood were always there, and I was a fool to think I could get away with humor forever.

  The worst thing about depression is the anger that goes with it. If you can turn the anger on somebody else, it is the first step in getting better. My depressions crept up on me. I was suicidal in both and had to go to the hospital in each case for weeks.

  I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. I was on a crying jag in the first depression and I was manic in the second.

  In my manic phase I thought I could conquer the world. I could run from Eighty-ninth Street to Fifty-ninth Street in New York City in four minutes. I believed every woman was attracted to me. I gave my money away. I was on the greatest of highs.

  No one recognized my manic phase because people thought I was being funny.

  Then came the crash. I plunged into a terrible black inky lake. In this phase I was not only suicidal but also homicidal. I wanted to kill strangers passing me on the street. I broke out in a cold sweat and said, “I am not that kind of person.” So I decided to kill myself.

  My plan was to go to the Plaza, get a room on the sixteenth floor, and jump out the window. I spoke to my doctor on the phone and he said it wasn’t such a good idea.

  He talked me into coming back to Washington and he put me in the psychiatric ward of Georgetown University Hospital, where they fed me lithium.

  A depression is impossible to describe to someone who hasn’t had one. Even the psychiatrists who treat you for it don’t know what they are talking about.

  You are ashamed of yourself. You lose all self-respect. You feel worthless. You are sure everyone knows your dirty, dark secrets.

  I had no energy. I was also paranoid. In my depression I didn’t ask God to help me. I was sure that it was the devil’s work and that I was already in hell and would never get out.

  8

  People in My Life

  Ann

  My wife, Ann, died twelve years ago, and she was buried on Martha’s Vineyard. That’s where I’ll be going—into the plot next to hers. We were married for forty years. It was a happy marriage, if you don’t count the unhappiness. But at the end Ann had a heart attack and then lung cancer. She coped by turning her anger against me, to the point where I felt it best for both of us if I left home. Still, we remained very close. My son, Joel, took care of her as she suffered through a long illness. Finally on July 3, 1994, she passed away.

  When a loved one dies, you carry around a lot of guilt. I still do. And even now, I hurt when I think about her. In an odd way, my days here in the hospice are somehow connected with her death. I think of her on Martha’s Vineyard and dream that I’ll be with her soon.

  Several years ago I wrote a novel called Stella in Heaven. The main character in the story, Stella, dies and goes to heaven—heaven being the Ritz-Carlton in Florida. In heaven, Stella can have anything she wants. Her husband, Roger, is still on earth and Stella decides to start r
unning his life, even to the point of trying to find another wife for him—but not seriously. Stella forms a search committee, but she winds up sabotaging Roger’s relationships with every new woman he becomes interested in. The whole plot was based on how I felt after Ann died.

  Of course, guilt is transferable; since I couldn’t get rid of it, I carried it into my new relationships. Every time I saw something we had done together, I thought of Ann, whether it was walking down a street in Paris, going to the National Art Gallery in Washington, or seeing her pictures around the house.

  Mother

  I wasn’t able to deal with my mother’s death in the way most people do. She was taken away from me right after I was born and she spent the rest of her life in a mental hospital.

  I never actually saw my mother. At the beginning it was because they wouldn’t let me, and at the end because I didn’t want to. Growing up, my sisters had seen her in the hospital, but I never went. I could have when I became an adult, but I didn’t want to. I was afraid she wouldn’t know me, and that would destroy my fantasy of her.

  Since I never knew her, I made up the mother I imagined she was. Over the years I kept a fantasy about “Mother.” I realized I had no right to call her “Mom” because I didn’t know her.

  When my mother died, I wrote a eulogy based on what I thought she would have been like:

  We gather here today to say farewell to Helen Kleinberger Buchwald. She was my mother. She was wise and beautiful and very caring.

  Since I was her only boy she showered me with her love, but at the same time, she was strict when it came to my grades at school. She dreamed that I would become a doctor, a lawyer, or an accountant.

  She always bought a new suit for me at Passover and, although she was Orthodox, she took me to the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall. She had a beautiful voice and sang Hungarian songs and also melodies by Irving Berlin, who she said was the greatest songwriter in the world.

  She always took my side in arguments with my sisters.

  One night I slept with all my clothes on and she made me take them off in the morning. That evening, to punish me, she wouldn’t give me any rice pudding, which was my favorite.

  A psychiatrist told me that when you grieve you think of all the things you didn’t do for your loved one and not the things you did do. I should have become a rabbi, which would have pleased my mother very much. I should have married a nice Jewish girl rather than a nice Catholic girl. When I left home I should have called her every day.

  All of us in this synagogue regret the things we didn’t do with Helen Kleinberger. She will be missed but not forgotten. I like to think she is now in heaven making rice pudding for the angels.

  I never told anyone about my eulogy, but it always made me feel better.

  Mother was in a state hospital for thirty-five years, having been diagnosed with manic depression. She died at age sixty-five.

  I was in Europe at the time of my mother’s death. My sisters didn’t call or telegraph me. They wrote me a letter that arrived three days after the funeral. I was deprived of seeing her in life and also when she died. I was terribly hurt, and I still am.

  Although my Uncle Oscar, Aunt Molly, and father had cemetery plots on Long Island, my mother was buried somewhere in New Jersey. My father’s friend was a member of a Jewish men’s lodge that owned grave sites out there, and Mr. Mestel, Poppa’s friend, could get him a plot. Even in death she was separated from the family.

  Several years ago I made up my mind to find her grave. The problem was that no one knew where she was buried. I called my three sisters. None of them could remember where she was interred, or sadly enough, even the day she died. They had blocked it out.

  My mother was a missing person. The only clue we had to the location of her burial site was a receipt from the company that had carved her headstone. I called the owner, Al Abramawitz. He said he had bought the business very recently from another company but still had the previous owner’s records, though they were not computerized.

  Mr. Abramawitz called back an hour later with the news that he had found the record of my mother’s burial. Helen died on April 15, 1958, and was buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Fairview, New Jersey. My sisters thought she had been buried in 1968. They were off by ten years. They were still in denial about her death.

  On a beautiful Sunday morning in March 2003, my sister Alice, my son, Joel, and I drove out to Mount Moriah. We had the location of the grave.

  I didn’t know what to expect. Alice had known our mother because she was six years older. I hadn’t known her at all.

  As we walked along the rows of gravestones, I kept reading names. I didn’t know any of them, but they reminded me of my own mortality. Mother’s gravestone was in the last row. It was dark gray. The carved letters read:

  Helen Buchwald

  Died April 15, 1958

  Beloved Wife and

  Devoted Mother

  Alice and I stared in silence for several minutes. I felt I was at the end of a long journey and the circle had now been closed.

  Standing at graveside, Alice began talking about Mother. She said she was beautiful, Orthodox, and a very tough cookie. Alice remembered Mother’s rule that before she could eat even a slice of bread she had to say a prayer.

  Edith and Alice had visited her in the state hospital over the years. Sometimes Mother knew who they were and sometimes she thought they were girls who worked for Pop. Here is a funny thing about visiting the cemetery: Mother’s gravestone was a foot taller than all the others around her.

  As we left Mount Moriah, Alice and I laughed.

  Pop

  Though I never had the chance with my mother, I did attend my father’s funeral.

  All my life I had a strange relationship with Father. He was a Sunday father. Since my sisters and I were living in foster homes, he came on Sundays to visit. By the time I was sixteen, I saw him on a daily basis, but we didn’t have much to say to each other. We slept in the kitchen together (the girls had the bedroom). He was really a good man, and a kind man. But he had no control over me.

  He used to say, “You dasn’t do this,” and “You dasn’t do that.” I didn’t argue, I just did as I pleased. I was his only son and I hurt him—first when I refused to be bar mitzvahed, then when I ran away from home and joined the Marines, and finally when I moved to Paris. He couldn’t understand why I wanted to become a writer. When it turned out I made a living at it, Dad couldn’t tell me how proud he was. But later my sisters told me he carried my articles in his pocket and showed them to everybody.

  My father worked very hard sewing and hanging curtains and draperies, but he never made much money at it. The joke in the family was that if he had been successful, I would now be the president of the Aetna Curtain Company.

  Joseph Buchwald was five feet eight inches tall, and very strong because he carried the drapes and curtains on the subway. He worked until the day before he died at age seventy-nine. I remember seeing him a week before he passed away; he was talking about dying, and I said, “You dasn’t do that.” He smiled.

  When he did die, on July 6, 1972, the funeral services were held in a temple in Forest Hills. Fifteen minutes before the service the rabbi called me into his office and said, “So tell me something about your father.” I was not in a good mood. “Rabbi,” I said, “you never knew my father and you can’t do a canned eulogy about him.”

  “What can I say?” the rabbi asked.

  “Say the prayers and that’s enough.”

  My father was buried on Long Island and I cried because we never got to know each other. I mourned him, mainly for the lonely life he led after my mother was put away, living in one room in the Bronx. I still talk to him and I tell him, “I am sorry that I wasn’t bar mitzvahed, Pop.”

  9

  Final Arrangements

  A Good Surrogate

  The two important pieces of business you have to attend to before you climb the golden stairs are a regular w
ill and a living will.

  The regular will spells out to whom you want to leave your worldly goods. If there are a lot of worldly goods, it’s better to have it done with a lawyer.

  Disinheriting someone can be almost as much fun as inheriting them. Attitudes toward loved ones change all the time.

  It’s the last power trip you can take.

  Some people leave money they don’t have to a church or charity. In my case, my wife pretended she had half a million dollars to leave to the bishop. She didn’t have it. Since I don’t go to confession, I wasn’t bothered by cutting him off.

  One of the games people play has to do with which heirs you want to leave money to and which ones you want to leave out. The last year of your life is very important when it comes to writing a will. There are several people I had mentioned in my will, but when I got mad at them I crossed them out.

  If you want to be kept in somebody’s will, be nice and give him a box of candy.

  The living will has to do with making all your wishes known before you die. You must tell someone if you want to be kept on life support (or not), how you want to get buried, what kind of funeral you want, and how much you want spent on a coffin.

  One day I read a story in The Washington Post about appointing a surrogate to make decisions for you if you should become incapacitated by illness.

  My question is, whom can you trust to make such serious decisions?

  I’ve always been under the impression that a surrogate would do exactly what an ill person requests. But this is not necessarily true. Rick Weiss, who wrote the Post article, pointed out that according to a survey by the National Institutes of Health, surrogates often do not fulfill the wishes of the patient. The survey participants, who were volunteer patients, were asked to imagine that they were incapacitated. Their designated surrogates, who were given descriptions of the patients’ medical circumstances, were supposed to make a decision about what the loved one really wanted. The surrogates got it right only 68 percent of the time.