Columnists
Losing Gus
We lost my neighbour Gus Garland last month. You might have come across his death notice in The Times.
Gus was a very private person. He stipulated there was to be no public funeral, memorial, visitation, celebration of life or other remembrance of him. He also threatened me with eternal damnation if I ever wrote about him my column; I’m taking the calculated risk that he can’t deliver on the threat.
By specifying that he wanted no fuss and no muss, Gus missed out on a lot of exciting new opportunities to make his death the ultimate expression of his personal ‘brand’. I’ve been saving up some newspaper clippings about it. For example, he could have elected to pay a premium to have his ashes buried at sea, or in outer space. He could have been buried in an “Infinite Body Suit,” a shroud holding flesh-eating mushrooms to ensure rapid decomposition. Or he could have ordered a headstone embedded with a computer chip that when exposed to a smartphone would generate a full personal history.
Gus also missed out on the chance to customize his memorial service. No Simon and Garfunkel singing Bridge Over Troubled Water for him. And he missed the wave of coffin clubs. They’re billed as a social way to plan your last big personal expenditure. At such a club, you know you have at least one thing in common with everyone else: you’re all going to the same destination; your trains just leave at different times.
And he could have followed the lead of New York jazz musician Victor Goins, who sought out and bought a premium priced plot located near the graves of Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, because it gave him a special comfort to know he would be buried near the greats. The other side of the coin—that by choosing the location he was condemning himself to suffer a distant third (or worse) place ranking in eternity—didn’t seem to matter to him.
Back to Gus. Gus grew up in the Depression years. Avoiding unnecessary expense or display of ostentation was his watchword. He would sooner have bought rotten vegetables than pay more for fresh ones. (Actually, he grew his own tomatoes until a couple of years ago). He was quite content to read the daily newspaper as a one-day-old handoff from me rather than buy his own subscription. So he would take great satisfaction in knowing that by avoiding a memorial service, he saved the cost of sandwiches, flowers and dry cleaners.
And Gus was not really a ‘branding’ type of guy. His favourite activity, apart from tending his tomatoes, reading his newspaper and riding his lawn tractor, was sitting in his front yard with his friend and neighbour Hugh under the shade of his mountain ash tree and just shooting the breeze. He hated talking about himself, although he could be almost relentless in quizzing you about your own life. The one subject he was prepared to let a little light on to was his late wife Mary Lou, who passed away 10 years ago after a long struggle with Crohn’s disease. One spring, my wife and I took Gus out to Sandbanks park where he delivered on his promise to show us the prime trillium blooms that he and Mary Lou used to enjoy visiting together.
Over the past couple of years, Gus’s health began to decline, and in recent weeks his will to live departed. I could tell life was slipping away from him when he decided to stop reading our newspaper about a month before he passed away.
The last thing I am going to begrudge Gus is his choice of a non-farewell. Indeed, it takes a special dollop of humility to see your own passing as just not significant enough to to warrant public recognition.
But there is another way of looking at it, which I will commit to paper even though it won’t affect Gus’s choices. His direction to bypass a funeral was another reach from beyond the grave. Funerals, they say, are for the living. The living appreciate the opportunty to grieve collectively. There are few enough occasions on which it is permisssible to cry in public. And a funeral is an opportunity to make amends for the fact that in our day to day dealings we tend to judge people harshly and fail to appreciate their best qualities. It is also a chance to acknowledge the sacrifices that people make to care for others, for which they don’t award medals. Further, it seems that this public grieving is a bridge one has to cross in order to reconcile oneself to the fact of a person’s death.
I haven’t planned my own funeral yet. But Gus has got me thinking about it. Maybe I should provide that every column I’ve ever written for The Times be read in succsession, until the hall is emptied. As background, I could have jazz music—performed by Victor Goins.
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