'Much to Enjoy and Admire'

I think we both sensed it might be our final conversation. We talked about the Cleveland we knew as kids – the main library downtown on Superior Avenue, Kay’s Books over on Prospect, a bar called Hernando’s Highway on Chester by the Greyhound station, Grabowski’s Music Studio where Ken started playing clarinet at age seven. And our Uncle Harry who, back in the Sixties, had wired his pickup truck for sound and from blocks away we heard blasting polka music. And our cousin Lenny who had an electric guitar, though the only tune he knew how to play was the Twilight Zone theme. In retrospect, I see that what these random things had in common was some degree of amusement. No resentments or regrets. We weren’t recalling the miseries, painful and trifling. This wasn’t a conscious strategy. We shared the memories that bubbled to the surface. 

Sitting beside his bed in hospice, something moved me to bring up Montaigne, author of essays that are of central importance to me. Ken had never read the Frenchman. I spoke from memory, mostly half-remembering one of the early essays, “That our happiness must not be judged until after our death”:

 

“There are gallant and fortunate deaths. I have seen death bring a wonderfully brilliant career, and that in its flower, to such a splendid end that in my opinion the dead man’s ambitions and courageous designs had nothing so lofty about them as their interruption. He arrived where he aspired to without going there, more grandly and gloriously than he had desired or hoped. And by his fall he went beyond the power and the fame to which he had aspired by his career.”

Ken died in hospice on August 24, 2024. He had stopped talking several days earlier and entered a blank, frozen, apparently painless state. His son and I played music for him. Donald Frame writes in his biography of the great essayist: “Montaigne finds much to enjoy and admire wherever he goes.”

[The Montaigne passage is from Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford University Press, 1957). He is author of Montaigne: A Biography (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).]