'Memories Packed in the Rapid-Access File'

Last Saturday morning, the day my brother would die, the Uber driver who carried me from hotel to hospice in the morning went by the professional name “Lazarus” – an omen I choose to leave unexamined and merely enjoy. Ken would have enjoyed it.

Shortly after his death one of the nurses, referring to his early days in hospice when he was still able to speak, called him a “jokester.” I can’t remember him ever telling a joke. What she meant was that my brother was constitutionally incapable of taking anything too seriously, starting with himself. Even moaning in pain when he lost the power to move and the nurses had to wash and rearrange him in his hospital bed he found amusing. I can hear him saying, “Three women!” Don’t misunderstand: he was seldom goofy or childish. Rather, he relished our ridiculous pomposity. Vanity always cracked him up – an invaluable gift when dealing with humans. I know that some will condemn this capacity as perverse, a refusal to grow up, but most of the funniest people I know are imbued with gravitas. 

The novel I was reading while visiting my brother for the last time was Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Brothers and Sisters (1929). Ken didn’t read much fiction, which is a shame because he would have been attuned to her brand of clinical wit, and she was very good on the savagery of family life. Here’s a characteristic exchange in the novel I was reading:

 

“‘What a blank Christian Stace’s death has left,’ said Sarah.

 

“‘You have the gift of saying these things, Sarah,’ said Julian. ‘I often think it is fortunate that gifts are rare. I am not speaking to wound you. I don’t mean to belittle blanks. I try to be a person to leave a blank. I quite dread to die, because of my blank, the poorness of it; and I know one ought not to dread to die. I know your blank will be better.’”

 

The nastiness of outrageous sentiments is made acceptable when put in the mouths of characters, not the author’s. What I’ll miss most about my brother is his ever-ready wit. Each day I will encounter phrases, sentiments or situations he would have found funny, and my impulse will be to text it to him. One of my readers, along with condolences, sent me a poem by John Updike, “Perfection Wasted,” which closes:

 

“The jokes over the phone. The memories packed

in the rapid-access file. The whole act.

Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;

imitators and descendants aren’t the same.”

 

[Compton-Burnett died on this date, August 27, in 1969 at age eighty-five.]