let's live and breath our eulogies

A few days ago, an American writer named David Foster Wallace killed himself, finishing off a more than twenty year battle with the hell of depression. I hadn't heard much of him before he died, but when he did, the McSweeney's website posted a tribute to him, and I thought I'd have a look at his stuff. I borrowed a book of essays called A Supposedly Funny Thing I'll Never Do Again, and i have been blown away. His writing is so impressive. He was amazing. Check him out. And it inspired to to write the following (i think i was thinking along these lines before, and his death jsut really pushed me along).


Sometimes people die. And when they do, people who knew them start speaking, weaving this poetics around them, around the idea of their lives and who they were and what they meant to the world, and sometimes this is falsified, so that Joe Blow across the road who used to yell at you to shut up and stay off his lawn when you were a kid but who once gave you a cookie when you were crying after you fell of your bike one day but who you don’t really know anything about, has posthumously become this emblem of saintly generosity and the best in humanity, and we must keep his memory alive.
But the people who are still living usually don’t get such treatment. What will we say about them after they have died? What will we say about our girlfriends, our boyfriends, our best friends, our parents, our sisters and brothers and favourite lecturers?
There is this poetics that is mostly reserved for the dead, or else the distant idol, that brings such an appreciation of their lives. I remember going to the funeral of some old man many years ago – maybe my grandfather, maybe someone else’s, I don’t remember – the things that were said about him there amazed me. Apparently, he had done all this stuff in his life that I had no idea about because no one ever really talked about it, especially as he grew old and senile and became in some ways a burden to be put up with out of duty rather than this person worthy of admiration. Because when you live with people day in day out you easily forget things that would render them worthy of such worship in a eulogy, or else you don’t think of this half as poetically as you do after they’re no longer with you.
Maybe sometimes we should all pretend our favourite people have died, and weave beautiful mythologies around their lives.