The Obituary

Born in the year that was, died in the year that is,
survived by the wife, three children and six
grandchildren, retired from the business
of being himself in nineteen eighty-six.
Preceded in death by the father and the mother,
preceded in death by the brother from the war,
and now himself preceded by another
generation’s memory of what he was before.

The obituary gets the facts but not the feeling,
it lists the names and dates but not the meaning,
not the arguments and not the laugh,
not the way he always ate the better half
of everything, the obituary gets the facts.

In lieu of flowers send donations to
the research fund for the disease that took him,
which is the most American of what we do
with grief: we try to solve the thing that shook him
from the living, as if money sent forward
could un-death him or could at least prevent
the same thing happening to someone toward
the end of a life as fully lived and spent.

I read the obituary three times on the day it ran
and found it insufficient and exactly right,
insufficient for the complicated man
it summarized, exactly right in its polite
compression of the facts of a human life:
the dates, the survivors, the service information,
the carefully omitted history of his knife-
edge moments and his complex navigation.