Writes David Sedaris in "A Better Place/Why the euphemisms? My father did not 'pass.' Neither did he 'depart.' He died" (The New Yorker).
August 30, 2021
"'Well, I know that your father did his best.' People love saying this when a parent dies."
"It’s the first thing they reach for. A man can beat his wife with car antennas, can trade his children for drugs or motorcycles, but still, when he finally, mercifully dies, his survivors will have to hear from some know-nothing at the post-funeral dinner that he did his best. This, I’m guessing, is based on the premise that we all give a hundred and ten per cent all the time, in regard to everything: our careers, our relationships, the attention we pay to our appearance, etc.
'Look around,' I want to say. 'Very few people are actually doing the best that they can. That’s why they get fired from their jobs. That’s why they get arrested and divorced. It’s why their teeth fall out. Do you think the "chef" responsible for this waterlogged spanakopita is giving it his all? Is sitting across from me, spouting clichés and platitudes, honestly the best that you can do?'"
Writes David Sedaris in "A Better Place/Why the euphemisms? My father did not 'pass.' Neither did he 'depart.' He died" (The New Yorker).
Writes David Sedaris in "A Better Place/Why the euphemisms? My father did not 'pass.' Neither did he 'depart.' He died" (The New Yorker).
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I have always detested the use of passed for died. Makes my skin crawl.
Joe Biden is doing the best he can.
Maybe daddy did do his best. He knew exactly where to beat his wife and kids so it wouldn't leave any marks.
He got really good deals when he traded in his kids for drugs, and the time he sold his daughter into slavery for a '74 Continental is still talked about to this day.
The man was a legend...give his his due.
My parents were once buried across the street from a forest. They now reside across the street from the Golden Corral. Directly across the street, right on the other side of the chain link fence. I was there last week, as it was my Mother's birthday. I could smell breakfast cooking.
They didn't move, but the forest and the Golden Corral did. I actually feel kind of good about that, knowing them. They would like that, especially my Dad.
Sedaris is, as always, hilarious and insulting.
That business about teeth falling out might be a bit too close to home for me.
Passed away and departed are not euphemisms, they carry colors of meaning implying peaceful natural death, something many men desire above a painful, violent one. Died, however, implies nothing but death. Take for example, the 16-year-old ensign passed away when a cannonball splattered his brains over the battlefield and his comrades' faces. To my ears that sounds like macabre sarcasm. It isn't something a considerate officer would write to the young man's mother.
I am sadly not surprised that David Sedaris is ignorant of the distinction, as the beauty, precision, depth, and vitality of English withers before our eyes.
What is it, something like five stages of grief, people go thru.
I don't think we should be too hard on how people handle awkward, uncomfortable moments like what to say to someone handling a family or friend's death. There are far more of us who don't know what to say and so end up saying something trite or weird than those who find just the right thing to say (or not say).
As to the euphemisms, I think that is a recognition that many people don't view death as final, they believe that the deceased's spirit or consciousness is simply relocated to an unseen plane. In the African-American community, for example, I think it's common to refer to it as "home-going".
David Sedaris seems a little old to be discovering that people say things they don't 100% mean, in order to be polite or otherwise smooth over social interactions. Most of us have that figured out by kindergarten.
I can't wait until he reads Catcher in the Rye and discovers "phonies," it will like, open up a whole new intellectual world for him.
Seriously dude, watch the Ozu film, "Good Morning," or frankly any Ozu film, if you need to get an understanding of how language is used in seemingly banal but socially necessary interactions
Well of course, the intent is to sympathize with the survivors and show kindness to them. What good does it do to recite the failures of the deceased? He is not going to repent now; it's too late. The funeral is for the living, not the dead.
And BTW, I dislike the "pass" euphemism too. He died. And the rest of us will soon follow his passage.
This is personal for Sedaris, but he also makes a living in which he has to constantly produce new content in various formats.
"...survivors will have to hear from some know-nothing at the post-funeral dinner..."
At funerals and weddings, sometimes people are there who maybe don't need to be there. Or, these people genuinely wanted to be their for support. They feel they have to say *something.* Lazy speaking can be frustrating to endure, but not everyone is a paid writer/speaker. Give them a break and look elsewhere for ideas to pitch to The New Yorker.
This, I’m guessing, is based on the premise that we all give a hundred and ten per cent all the time, in regard to everything: our careers, our relationships, the attention we pay to our appearance, etc. 'Look around,' I want to say. 'Very few people are actually doing the best that they can. That’s why they get fired from their jobs. That’s why they get arrested and divorced. It’s why their teeth fall out. Do you think the "chef" responsible for this waterlogged spanakopita is giving it his all? Is sitting across from me, spouting clichés and platitudes, honestly the best that you can do?'"
Is he giving his all all of the time?
My favorite retort, variations of which come in handy in many situations is, "So? You don't get points for doing your best, your best is the minimum. If your best isn't better than this, then you need to figure out how to get better."
Ah funeral speeches. I attended a memorial service yesterday for a friend. Let's call him "Joe". I'd worked with Joe on a corporate legal staff during the 80s and 90s. Joe then went on the business side and had a very successful career as an international consultant. Joe was a bright and able guy with a sly sense of humor. A Catholic priest conducted the memorial service. The priest described Joe's career, commented on his love for his wife and sons, and on Joe's pro bono work after retirement. All the things the priest said were true insofar as I could tell.
I got the sense that the priest had known Joe well--almost as though Joe had been a faithful congregant and had attended mass for many years in the priest's parish. Nope--not so. The priest had never met Joe. But the priest was good--well spoken, handsome with a shock of white hair. He could have had a career in Hollywood.
But memorial services are designed to provide balm for grieving families and friends. And those who conduct them do try. My father was in hospice care for a few weeks before he died. The pastor conducting the service met with my father two days before his death. My mother and father loved each other, but they'd argue about anything and everything throughout their marriage of 62 years. At the funeral service the pastor said that the success of my parents' long marriage was due to my parents never having argued. At that point the family members attending burst out laughing. As the eldest son I had to tell the pastor that maybe my father might have told him a whopper. I'll give the fellow props though--he worked with the material my father had given him.
maybe they're just being polite
They have faith, that when They die... They'll pass on to heaven
They're pretty sure, that when You die... You'll be roasting the the fiery fires of hell
But, to be nice, they'll say that you're in a better place (for the Rest of US)
David Sedaris' father was an IBM Engineer. My father was an IBM technology Educator. IBM required a hell of a lot of their employees and employees' families in terms of time and commitment to the job. In return, thanks to his father's sacrifices, David Sedaris had the luxury to do what neither his father nor mine did: waddle around for decades failing repeatedly at useless college degrees and taking stupid temp jobs while living the life of the flaneur.
Only, not completely: real flaneurs actually understood that they were a drain on productive society and had the humility to see their place: be amusing if frequently unproductive.
What a grotesque and inhumane way to remember his deceased father, no matter what the man did -- which sounds awfully vague compared with the examples Sedaris uses slyly, without coming out and just saying why he so ass-chapped at the man that he kicks him when he's dead -- to a national audience.
Were these men perfect? No. But they got up in the morning and went to work and paid for their ungrateful sons to study performance art and other stupid degrees. Is David Sedaris perfect? No. It's far healthier to forgive at the moment of death and remember and respect the sacrifices the dead made for us. At his age, he should have figured some of this out.
What an increasingly insane, unfunny, ugly little man he has become. Good thing he has no children to take his own rage out upon.
I don't mind the euphemisms even though I tend to stick to the literal terms for death. However, I've never understood the complaint about euphemisms in this context. Maybe people just like them because they're more lyrical. Death is so ugly it's nice to have a little bit of beauty to surround it. Like flowers at a funeral.
I always get a sense of self-congratulation from the complainers. Almost as if they're saying, "Look at me. I'm ready to look at the world as it really is, not like the rest of you rubes." Maybe I'm just reading too much into it. Still, I don't think there's anything particularly virtuous about saying "died" rather than "passed on".
It is quite possible that we are doing our best at all times. Given both the theory of evolution and quantum theory (and don't get me started on the multiverse theories), our freedom to act is all an illusion and we simply respond to the vast array of chemical and physical stimuli that produce our actions. There is no morality, there is no will, there is only what happens, purely causal actions. Life's a lot less worrisome if you accept the fact that human activity is as random and morality free as earthquakes and bee stings. Then it doesn't matter that your family was drones, you had an affair with a powerful politician or you play hours a day on video games. It is just random, chaotic activity.
Man, that New Yorker serves up a mean white protestant angst, don't it?
Man, that New Yorker serves up a mean white protestant angst, don't it?
Storge
Philia
Agape
So tres passe.
The miserable, embittered "soul" that is David Sedaris rages on.
'Very few people are actually doing the best that they can. That’s why they get fired from their jobs. That’s why they get arrested and divorced. It’s why their teeth fall out.
Because I really doubt that David Sedaris has any idea of the history of Christian theology or its effect on the societies it has influenced, let me spell it out for him:
This was the sort of moral judgementalism that made Christian hard-ass moral rigorists like the Calvinists the bane of everyone they came in contact with.
I grew up in the late 60's & 70's in Bible-belt northern Alabama & I thought the Christians I grew up with were hard-asses. But, ya know what? Even they, when pushed, knew & had to admit, along with St. Paul, that "all have sinned...[and] fallen short of the glory of God". Knowledge of our own Falleness opens up the moral space for our Forgiveness of the Falleness of others.
Not so a putz like Sedaris. He knows that what his fellow human beings struggle to say in the face of all-conquering Death is sadly lacking, and he thinks it's time to speak the Truth, no matter how hurtful. "Yeah, lady, yer better off without the old drunken bum!". Ya know, most everybody at a funeral knows the foibles of the deceased all too well. But now, the soul of the deceased is standing before the judgement of his Creator, and is beyond our justice. All that we that are still here have left to hold us together & to heal us is forgiveness.
He's angry at what he eats at his father's funeral and what people say at his father's funeral. He's probably angry at the ground where his father's buried. You wonder what his father did - but no, you hasten away with cliches on your lips and forget this human disaster.
David Sedaris, a man who has made a comfy living from revealing his most private thoughts. I hope (I guess, though it seems awfully presumptuous of me) that he is indeed grieving, and that's why he's so brittle and unfunny here.
So he actively disliked his father. That's sad but not uncommon. And he doesn't like euphemisms about death - which would, it seems to me, reflect the unconscious narcissism of grief: this moment is about me and should be done my way - except that if I'm recalling the little Sedaris I've read accurately, he's that way all the time.
Or at least he projects that narcissism for comic (?) effect. Maybe he's a perfectly nice, not overly self-involved guy in person.
I always get a sense of self-congratulation from the complainers [about euphemisms for death]. Almost as if they're saying, "Look at me. I'm ready to look at the world as it really is, not like the rest of you rubes."
Exactly what nettled me about it here. Here Sedaris is, to my sensibilities wildly inappropriately focused on the quality of the spanakopita at the funeral dinner of a father he didn't love or respect but others certainly might have, while also looking down his nose at those he thinks aren't focused on the real and right thing.
If you're tough enough to take the news straight unvarnished, you should be generous enough to allow weaker people their comfort and safety in euphemisms.
"I have always detested the use of passed for died. Makes my skin crawl."
Racist.
His sister being the brilliant Amy, of course. I'm not picky. If the brittle little bitch is funny, I'll laugh, and he's generally funny within the limits of the platform--his examples of the too-long-lived are utterly predictable; apparently Biden is still welcome at the feast.
At my age I've endured some risibly inaccurate eulogies, and tried my best to do better when I got the opportunity. And I've left strict instructions that no clergyperson, in his or her official capacity, is to say anything at all on my behalf at my funeral, if there is one.
Mencken said to "always remember that if you don't attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours."
mezzrow, no disrespect to your parents intended, but your Golden Corral story has me picturing trays of meatloaf and plates of Jello levitating and splattering on diners, while someone yells at the manager, "you moved the headstones, but you left the bodies, didn't you?!"
This essay reminded me of a friend I knew growing up. We weren't friends in elementary school or even most of high school- he dropped out after 8th grade. But I got to know him a lot better during my last two years of high school because we played pickup basketball together. I also learned about his home life- his father was a very physically abusive drunk. The summer after I graduated from college, and just before I moved away to Chicago, my friend's father was killed in a car accident while drunk (single car accident). I met him for beer a few days after the funeral, and I started to give my condolences, and my friend put up his hand, shook his head. So, I told him I understood, and we talked about what he was going to do in the future. That was the last time I remember ever seeing him. I don't know what became of him.
David Sedaris was a bratty little suburban kid from a well off family who grew up wrestling with his sexuality and became repulsed at his father and his conservative and pedestrian ways...
As an adult he learned to entertain rich white women with a quip and funny observation about life- his own and others.
He found someone to put up with him.
Later in life, like many of his age, personality and political proclivities, he became Trump deranged, unfunny, and more than a little bitter, leaving the world worse off than he found it...
He leaves his obnoxious sister, etc etc etc...
I'm sure David Sedaris' family is grateful that he got this all off his chest. Perhaps they feel comforted to know how little Sedaris appreciated their efforts for his father's funeral and how little regard he had for his father.
I do wonder if his opinion of his father is so poor that he suggests that he is in hell, why he bothered to attend the funeral at all. Both parents are now dead, so likely only his siblings would have an issue with him if he didn't show up, but they also probably are aware that the relationship was "complicated", so they might have been understanding.
Also, "doing your best" doesn't necessarily imply that you are doing things perfectly, or even consistently. Sometimes "the best you can do" is barely adequate, and other times it is beyond expectations. "Doing his best" may just mean that given his flaws and limitation, the man reached his capabilities, even if they were not very high.
Tom T wins the internet for the day!
Dude has got some issues.
mezzrow, no disrespect to your parents intended, but your Golden Corral story has me picturing trays of meatloaf and plates of Jello levitating and splattering on diners, while someone yells at the manager, "you moved the headstones, but you left the bodies, didn't you?!"
none taken... I can envision a plate of grits with two eggs medium on top and bacon crumbled over the whole thing in the morning; a strip steak, salad (w/ blue cheese) and baked potato (loaded) in the evening levitating across the street and over the fence. It's a happy thought. Dad would be good with that. Mother would just levitate the whole dessert bar.
---David Sedaris was a bratty little suburban kid from a well off family who grew up wrestling with his sexuality [rehajm]
Maybe the peevishness is because TikTok made him straight.
I dunno. I'm just not triggered by the stuff.
My father died young. He was an old-school disciplinarian when it came to his four sons, and we provoked a lot of belt-whuppins. More than was usual even in those barbaric times, as I found out later.
A friend of mine once complained about his own father, and even seemed to envy me that mine had died early. That was weird.
“ Man, that New Yorker serves up a mean white protestant angst, don't it?”
He’s not Protestant. He’s an atheist who was was raised in a Greek Orthodox religious tradition.
About five years ago, my wife and I took my mother to visit the cemetery in Henderson, where her parents are buried despite the fact that neither one had lived in Henderson since about 1910 or so, and neither one had any close relatives there that I knew of.
My grandfather, who died twenty years before I was born, might have bought the plots at some early stage of his career as an educator around west Tennessee. They're at one of the high points that overlooked a nice residential street even as late as 1976, when we buried Granny.
In 2016 the view across the street was of a self-service carwash and a laundromat. Not that the view matters to them.
I always thought nothing ameliorates that teenage resentment of your old man like having to raise a son of your own. Sedaris may prove me righter than I realized: apparently, literally nothing else does that.
Lucky for him, the modern media craves eternal adolescence. But I wouldn't trade places with him for all the tea in China.
I attended a Sederis performance at Symphony Hall in Boston a few years ago with my wife and some friends. Of course I laughed at some of his snarky wit, since he actually does produce funny takes on some things. But I definitely felt like I needed a shower afterwards — there’s so much hatred and disdain in his view of the world (and this was pre-Trump!) that I wonder how anyone can listen to him for long without getting depressed. I have certainly given him a wide berth since that evening.
No idea whether his father did his best, but anything beats bitching about nothing like the son is doing.
I think it was Nancy Mitford who pointed out that the upper classes preferred to just say "died" rather than "passed away," and Paul Fussell who contrasted the upper class "died," the middle class "passed away" and the lower class "called to Jesus."
Mitford and Fussell wanted to champion the supposedly honest and straightforward language of the upper classes who called a spade a spade with the euphemisms and affectations of those down the social scale, but the effect was to make "U-speak" sound snobbish and affected and the supposed honesty of the upper classes just look like another arrogant pose.
I always said "died," but the snobbery of people like Fussell and the Mitfords turned me off, so I don't have a problem with "passed away." The people who say it are trying to soften the blow that others have suffered. "Passed," though, still strikes me as something new, something you didn't hear in the old days.
***
I didn't know what to say when relatives died. Eventually I saw that everyone else was saying "Sorry for your loss," so I went with that. It gets boring after a while just saying the same thing, but it's harder to come up with the right words.
I wouldn't presume to say "I know he meant well." I don't know that anybody meant well. And saying somebody "meant well" implies that they didn't succeed at what they wanted to achieve.
Just a few suggestions:
How are you?
How is your [mom, dad, sister, etc]?
Are you okay?
Is there anything I can do?
Can I take you to lunch when things settle down?
Can I take your mom out to dinner next week?
Can I help with [cleanup, thank you notes, meals, phone calls, The Family]?
Would you like some of my photos of [the deceased]?
Can I take care of the [kids, dog, cat, parrot] so you can get away for a couple of days?
Can I drive [Aunt Lucy] to the airport so you don't have to?
Really, the possibilities are endless as long as there is a question mark at the end.
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