1. There are no rules.
2. Everyone will expect you to be properly somber or distraught or devestated: ignore them. It’s one of the priveleges of grief: no one can tell you how to behave.
3. People will approach you and try to say exactly the right thing, as if there is a right thing. I read that, after her husband died, someone asked Dorothy Parker if there was anything they could do. She answered, “You can bring my husband back.” When the person looked stunned, Parker continued, “And if you can’t do that, then I’d like a ham sandwich.”
4. As for God and faith, the author and screenwriter William Goldman said the perfect thing. He was talking about Hollywood, but his words apply to religion as well: “Nobody knows anything.” Despite centuries of dogma and parchment and churches and mosques and synagogues: no one knows anything. Your guess is as good as mine.
5. Funerals are never fun, because they’re orgies of respectability. Memorials are usually better, because they reflect the personality of the deceased. I went to a memorial at the Public Theater for Ed Kleban, who wrote the lyrics for A Chorus Line, and who’d been an appealing if eccentric character. One of Ed’s closest friends got up and began her remarks by saying, “God knows, Ed was cheap.” Everyone laughed, because the woman was right, and because she’d clearly known and loved Ed. Ed had also loved sheep, although not in any erotic way, but when I’d gone to his apartment, he’d had many issues of a magazine called Sheep! fanned out on his coffee table.
When I met Ed he’d made a fortune from A Chorus Line, and I was just out of college and living in a studio apartment hellhole with cockroaches. One morning Ed called me and asked, quite seriously, “Paul, I want your opinion. Should I have a car and driver on call 24 hours a day?” I was furious, but I finally sputtered, “EVERYONE should have a car and driver on call 24 hours a day!”
6.When my mother was in her apartment, but undergoing hospice care, a very nice social worker appeared and asked if my Mom would like to speak with a rabbi. I asked my Mom, and she said no. Then my Mom summoned me back to her bedside and said, cackling with laughter, “Tell that social worker to tell the rabbi that God is dead!” I repeated this to the social worker, who murmured, “I don’t think I can tell him that.”
7. During the peak years of the American AIDS crisis, memorials were so common that people would compare and rank them. This was an entirely human response to chaos.
8. When I see those mountains of cheap flowers, heart-shaped helium balloons and stuffed animals which appear following shootings and other tragedies, I think all sorts of things. First, I remember those Egyptian tombs where the pharoahs are surrounded by the luxury goods which they’ll use in the next world. Then I wonder about the people who’ll eventually have to dispose of the rotting flowers and the rain-soaked teddy bears. Then I get over myself and know that if creating those memorials helps people to express their grief, then those teddy bears have served a purpose. When it comes to grief, good taste is beside the point.
9. A dear friend of mine is from the South, where grief can become gleefully competitive. As he once told me, “It’s not really a funeral unless someone falls into the open grave.”
