Clichés and platitudes
September 4, 2021 2:12 PM   Subscribe

"A man can beat his wife with car antennas, can trade his children for drugs or motorcycles, but still, when he finally, mercifully dies, his survivors will have to hear from some know-nothing at the post-funeral dinner that he did his best." David Sedaris writes about grieving in his own way.
posted by They sucked his brains out! (66 comments total) 46 users marked this as a favorite
 
My last words to him—and I think they are as telling as his, given all we’ve been through—are “We need to get to the beach before the grocery stores close.” They look cold on paper, and when he dies, a few weeks later, and I realize they were the last words I said to him, I will think, Maybe I can warm them up onstage when I read this part out loud. For, rather than thinking of his death, I will be thinking of the story of his death, so much so that after his funeral Amy will ask, “Did I see you taking notes during the service?”
from the recent Happy Go-Lucky

It looks like those notes turned into this essay. I have enjoyed reading about David Sedaris try to make sense of his relationship with his father. My father died in 2014, and I'm still not really sure who he was or how he felt about me or my family, or whether I can make a story about his life that makes sense.
posted by mecran01 at 2:25 PM on September 4, 2021 [20 favorites]


I totally agree with his various snippy comments in this one.

"Why the euphemisms? Whom are they honestly helping? I remember hearing a woman on the radio a few years back reflecting on where she was the moment that Prince “transitioned.”

I hate the stupid death euphemisms. "Passed" on the freeway? Passed as in what, gas? Like he farted to death? Got his corpse converted to gas a la "Brave New World?" And yet you usually can't say anything like "died " even though it's honest, because People Would Be Offended that you said that someone's gone to meet their maker instead of pining for the fjords.

I had a coworker die right before the pandemic and people were so weird about the whole thing that it turned into "we lost her." Lost her like what, we could find her again out in the woods if we tried to look hard enough?

" Is sitting across from me, spouting clichés and platitudes, honestly the best that you can do?” Yes, that's usually the best anyone does, unfortunately. This is why I just say stuff like "I'm sorry" and leave it there.

I'm sure David has complicated as fuck feelings regarding his dad, who sounds comically difficult/a pain in the ass in his work. He was probably a lot worse IRL on a daily basis.

I also enjoyed his petty running commentary on the bad Greek catering. Been there, sir.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:53 PM on September 4, 2021 [29 favorites]


This reads like the second entry in a five-part series.
posted by mhoye at 2:54 PM on September 4, 2021 [15 favorites]


This reads like the second entry in a five-part series.

Let's see, Denial, Anger, yep, checks out.
posted by notoriety public at 2:59 PM on September 4, 2021 [28 favorites]


My mother taught me that at these difficult moments it doesn't matter exactly what you say, but it matters that you say something.
posted by chavenet at 3:06 PM on September 4, 2021 [9 favorites]


" 'A blessing,' you keep saying. 'He must have been a wonderful man to have been rewarded with such a long life.' ... As if that had anything to do with it All kinds of good people die young. You know who's living a 'good long life'? Henry Kissinger. Dick Cheney. Rupert Murdoch."

Henry Fucking Kissinger. That asshole has been part of the geopolitical landscape since I was a sentient young consumer of news, I am 56 now, and he must be a thousand years old.

Meanwhile, I'm planning to celebrate my mom's 86th birthday tomorrow with her, my dad, my sister, and my truly excellent two nieces and brother in law. And it will almost certainly be the last birthday celebration that my mother ever has, because she is dying of lung cancer and is down to 95 pounds from 126.

Did Mom bomb Cambodia? No, she did not.

Did Mom gin up a totally specious pretext for invading Iraq? No, she did not.

Did Mom degrade the very idea of journalism? No, she did not.

My mom, a churchgoing (Lutherans -- the two or three of us in Maine -- represent!) grandmother, is a retired registered nurse who's been a faithful volunteer for the Democratic Party, sent us to grade school with organic vegetables from her own garden in our lunchboxes, helped young mothers from small Maine towns get preventive care for their kids and birth control for themselves, set up a spacious and clean area for our standard poodle to whelp and care for nine puppies, and even sometimes succeeded in getting her book club to read serious fiction.

You might say I'm getting a head start on the "anger" part of the six phases of grieving.

SHIT.

(I know I'm breathing rarefied air. A lot of people don't live to see 86. But my mother's mother and grandmother both lived to be 95, so this? Is an unpleasant surprise.)
posted by virago at 3:34 PM on September 4, 2021 [134 favorites]


I didn't know until today that one of his sisters commited suicide. Very sad.
posted by Czjewel at 3:37 PM on September 4, 2021 [1 favorite]


One of my best friends died earlier this year (nor from COVID-19) and I knew within a couple of hours what I needed to say. He was the guy who had my back, no matter what and I needed to tell his family that he was like a brother to me. And I did and it was right and good.

When my grandmother died, many years ago, and my mom died several years later, I had to try come to terms with both those relationships, which were complicated, at best. I didn’t particularly like my grandmother, and I liked my mother more, but it was always distant. I still haven’t figured out what to say.

Sometimes, you just don’t know what to say and there’s no one to say it to, really. I still haven’t memorialized either.

I miss my mom, a little, because I think she was always in my corner, but it’s not like my best friend, who would have gone to the wall with me.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 3:40 PM on September 4, 2021 [9 favorites]


Nobody will ever approve of how you grieve. The rage that squeezes out around the edges about the meaninglessl of platitudes is the self same as being mad about mediocre catering. It feels better than the more complicated but more powerful feelings that one fears might tear you up and never stop once you begin feeling them in earnest.

I'm not even really sure this is cathartic - David Sedaris feels like he's painting by numbers the same way Onion articles evolve. Talented but swinging weakly at targets totally unperturbed by and usually ignorant of incisive snark.

So... The thing a friend told me during the fog of my mother's unexpected death at 59 that I repeat to friends in similar situations: "I love you. That fucking sucks." It's the only platitude I recall even scratching the surface of my internal emotional landscape, and didn't ask me to perform anything or process anything about our relationship.

Hope this helps someone.
posted by abulafa at 4:13 PM on September 4, 2021 [63 favorites]


This is weird, we just had the school survivor thread and someone mentioned David's sister having been sent to that horrible place. I ended up reading the essay where David talks about his sister's death. He is quick to minimize his sister's trauma, and disclaim any responsibility.
I am disinclined to read him making hay out of another family death.
posted by tigrrrlily at 4:24 PM on September 4, 2021 [14 favorites]


I liked this, probably because I also dislike the euphemisms that the funeral home industry have forced on us. The worst, when my mother died, was a sister who kept saying that she had "graduated." I didn't say anything because I'm not a monster and everyone is allowed to grieve in their own way. I just told people my mother had died, and noticed a few raised eyebrows that I didn't say passed or departed or whatever, and I'm like fuck you I get to use the words I want. I also didn't say that out loud because again, not a monster.

Honestly a little surprised that more of the cool kids here on Metafilter who love to hate on David Sedaris haven't shown up yet. I never liked the opprobrium he gets on this site for the crime of apparently writing about his life, which includes having siblings, and also having to write something new several times a year, because for some reason he needs money to pay for food. Not every essay is a masterwork (especially not this one), but they are almost all funny, well written, wry, and speak to a certain humanity in me that I don't always get to feel every normal day.
posted by seasparrow at 4:32 PM on September 4, 2021 [49 favorites]


I generally like David Sedaris overall (I'm the one that mentioned Tiffany elsewhere), but I definitely admit he's probably not the world's nicest person/a bit of a jerk as well. I've talked to him a few times at signings and it's an extremely odd experience and you really never know how it's going to go. I agree with seasparrow's assessment of his writing and that's why I read it, but I also admit that sometimes he does come off as at least somewhat heartless, particularly with regards to Tiffany. But I also suspect the rest of the family really just never understood her or her situation either, somehow.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:37 PM on September 4, 2021 [9 favorites]


I think that people use euphemism when they are uncomfortable with something. And there is pretty much nothing else people are as uncomfortable with as the idea that death comes to us all. But, I didn’t get paid to write something for the New Yorker, so what do I know?
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 4:41 PM on September 4, 2021 [2 favorites]


A thousand likes to abulafa for the phrase they’ve shared. I thought being a widower might make me better at relating to/ expressing my understand of other folks’ grieving but nope. What they wrote has the gleam of truth, and I hope I remember to share it whenever it’s true. Dunno why such words are hard to come by for the likes of myself.
posted by aesop at 4:45 PM on September 4, 2021 [2 favorites]


I have used the phrase "passed away" because "my brother is dead" is too abrupt in certain conversations.

My father's funeral mass was a joke and half, he sucked so much, and we had to endure the homage to someone who never existed. Catholic hypocrisy at it's best, but we laughed it off .

If you have read Sedaris, his father was never going to be dad of the year, and I identify with that. And, in a sibling group, it is often just trying to survive. So, I don't think he minimized his sister's trauma as much as said it wasn't his fault, but maybe I'm not recalling it well.

I've seen Victorian head stones stating that the deceased "fell asleep". The Heaven's Gate cult used the phrase, "left their vehicle".

People do say lame things, but often they are just trying to say something....I've been on both sides of this...
Even a trite card from a co-worker, or, in one example, one of my sibling's college friend was meaningful to me. Don't let awkwardness stop you from saying something, the simple, "this is awful, I'm so sorry" works fine.
posted by rhonzo at 4:56 PM on September 4, 2021 [17 favorites]


I'm pretty sure that it was Tiffany Sedaris' parents, not her brother or any of her siblings, who sent her to Elan School. One of the people who's in that category is the subject of this essay, and David Sedaris describes their relationship as "sixty-four years of constant criticism and belittlement", so, yeah, I could imagine that there are at the very least some pretty heavy-duty unprocessed baggage left there.

FWIW, I've always found the way that David writes about his family to be largely affectionate, albeit interleaved with sarcasm, and it's possible that there was some serious dysfunction there--you get hints of it peeking around the edges--and that, in the balance, he might be making them look better. The "Happy Go Lucky" essay above, and this one (linked in the FPP one), aren't full of rancor, and the quote that I repeated above is about as dire as the FPP one gets. Whether or not one feels constrained against speaking ill of the dead, or when and/or where and/or for how long, I think that it's appropriate and fine at some point to speak honestly of them.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:03 PM on September 4, 2021 [29 favorites]


The most helpful thing anyone said to me when my father died was that it was like getting your arm cut off - you're never the same, but you learn to live that way.

I've liked a lot of David Sedaris' work, but I think he's at a point where they're going to publish whatever he turns in (I may be totally wrong - maybe they rejected the first five versions of this - what do I know?). People use a lot of dumb and annoying euphemisms about death. What else is new? People say stupid things that are supposed to be comforting because they don't know what to say. They don't know what to say because death is hard. By the time I was 37, I'd lost both of my parents and my brother, so I heard a lot of stupid things. The people who said them at least were trying. What bothered me were the people who either told me they couldn't deal with my grief or just vanished - and there were a lot of them.

Plus the two people on the same day who said to me, six weeks after my brother died at 31, So are you pretty much over your brother's death now? That seemed like a different level of obnoxiousness to me.
posted by FencingGal at 5:04 PM on September 4, 2021 [27 favorites]


The only reason David Sedaris’s relationship with his father, or sister, or anybody, are any of our business is that he chooses to tell us about them. And he tells us what he chooses.

If you haven’t spent years dealing with a close family member’s struggle with chronic mental illness, you’re not in a position to criticize.
posted by panglos at 5:17 PM on September 4, 2021 [24 favorites]


METAFILTER: reads like the second entry in a five-part series
posted by philip-random at 5:33 PM on September 4, 2021 [8 favorites]


"I say, “What if I don’t want him with me? What if sixty-four years of constant criticism and belittlement was enough, and I’m actually fine with my father and me going our separate ways, him in a cooler at the funeral home and me here at the kids’ table.”"

I've been the 8 year old at this table.

Allow me to gently suggest to Mr. Sedaris that he stand up and go to the place where he wants to be.
posted by SunSnork at 5:42 PM on September 4, 2021 [3 favorites]


abulafa: "I love you. That fucking sucks." It's the only platitude I recall even scratching the surface of my internal emotional landscape...

Sometime the right words come easily to me, and sometimes I am mute. But alllllmost everyone gets it when I tell them at a funeral or hospital bedside or other Bad Time, "This really sucks, and I am sorry it's hurting you."
posted by wenestvedt at 5:42 PM on September 4, 2021 [7 favorites]


The first thing I encountered from this essay was the pull quote used above, but that part struck me so powerfully that it kinda transformed into the framing device for the whole thing. Apologies, I'm going to share a personal story.

There came a point where I got far enough along in my escape orbit from my own abusive dad that other people started to notice. His closest friends activated some kind of eerie Stepford gaslighting network and began finding moments to pull me aside about how my dad really loves me and he's, yeah, "doing his best." As if I simply wasn't making enough room in my own heart to understand what an emotional inconvenience my queerness was to him also.

I spent so many years listening to this "doing his best" bit that I now can't summon the cleverness to conceal my rage even a tenth as well as Sedaris attempts here. And I know this is a thing people say. It's a thing people say when abusers are alive. When they're living in your own house. Maybe even by other members of your family. I fully expect when that fucker finally goes, those are the phone calls I'm going to get from people I haven't seen or thought of in 30 years.

Everything else that follows in the essay feels like offgassing from the flare of rage provoked by that sentiment at the top. Yes, it gets all wrapped up in the semantic clumsiness of sympathetic expression. But that just seems like the convenient place he's decided to shove all the pain.
posted by mykescipark at 5:43 PM on September 4, 2021 [45 favorites]


There are people who can't hear the words that destroy everything for them. Cancer. Dead. Died. Killed. I mean this literally. If you tell someone "Your daughter was killed in a car accident," their brain may glitch on the word "killed" and they don't hear it. It's only the word that carries the meaning of something they cannot deal with, that one word will not register, even if you repeat it. You can end up in a circular conversation with them where they are trying to find out what happened but not understanding. "Where is my daughter? Was she hurt?"

There is a reason we use the mealy mouth euphemisms. If you have ever been in one of those horrible conversations you will understand why people in the industry get into the habit of using those terms. For most of us they are an annoying affectation. For some people they are the only way to get the information across or talk about the event that has devastated them.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:53 PM on September 4, 2021 [54 favorites]


Maybe my social circle is just not very inclined towards platitudes, but I honestly didn't have this problem when my mom died. I am mad at some people, some of whom may not deserve it, but it's not for using platitudes. I'm mad at people who didn't show up, or who showed up and made it all about how upsetting my mom's illness and death was for them, not about people who showed up and then said "passed away" rather than "died." I also am not particularly invested in whether random relatives and acquaintances acknowledge or approve of my complicated and unresolved issues with my semi-recently-deceased mother. I feel like this complaint is maybe a little bit of a grief cliche in itself, and while I don't begrudge anyone their complaints about their asshole acquaintances, I don't particularly relate to it.

Also, "transition," in the hospice world, has a fairly specific meaning. It means that someone is actively dying, like right now, as opposed to the soon-but-not-this-instant dying that everyone in hospice is doing. When you call up the hospice nurse line at 3 AM and say "my mother is transitioning, and I've given her the highest morphine dose, and she's doing this horrible moaning thing, can I give her more?" they will say yes in a way that maybe they wouldn't if she weren't, like, going to be dead in the next 24 hours no matter what. I am still pretty angry at the world about my mom's death, and I don't particularly have any desire to shield anyone from the horrible reality of those last few days, but transition is a useful shorthand for a real thing.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:00 PM on September 4, 2021 [35 favorites]


(I'm sorry, I didn't intend for this to end up so long, or so involved)

My father died 12 years ago, and in a very strange turn, I was actually home. I'd come back, bringing my wife and her parents so that everyone could meet each other. My dad was supposed to come from Kalamazoo to Chicago for the weekend, but fell sick with something he'd been hospitalized before (which, funny enough, I'd also been home for, years before that). I wanted to drop everything and go to Kalamazoo, but that would mean leaving my wife (who speaks some English, but then, not so much) and her parents (no English, and in their late 60s) in a lurch. My family told me not to worry, it was the same thing as before, and he'd be fine. I spoke to him myself, and he assured me not to worry. The plan had already been for my wife and her parents to spend a week in Chicago, and then I'd stay for another week.

I saw them off on a Thursday, and came back to a phone call from my uncle, telling me that I needed to get to Kalamazoo as soon as possible. There may have been some harsh words about me "gallivanting around Chicago while my father was dying." All of this came as a complete shock. I'd been told he'd be fine by many people, including my uncle, that there was nothing to worry about, even though I had had a difficult time doing anything else. Essentially my father's rapid decline had been kept from me during the week. In the morning, my sister, my cousin and I made the trip to Kalamazoo about half an hour faster than we'd ever made it before. Seeing my dad was unmaking. I can't now, and couldn't then really begin to describe what I saw, or the hole it tore in me. The doctor took us into a conference room and explained that, at best, he could keep my father alive for a couple more months, heavily sedated, and entirely dependent on the machines, but that he'd never leave that hospital bed. He told us that he could take him off the sedation that he was under, that we could try to talk to him, but that he wouldn't be able to speak to us. We asked him to do that, and when my father's eyes opened, they were wild, terrified, and he was in pain. I tried to ask him what he wanted, but he wasn't even able to respond. He was in such pain, and I felt I knew what needed to be done, but damn, I wanted him to say it. My older sister, who has always been my rock, the person I could turn to, fell apart. Seeing her unable to speak through her sobs made everything so much more... again, words don't work when trying to talk about this. All I know is that we'd been in my hometown for maybe an hour or two when I told the doctor that I wanted him to turn off the life support.

The memorial was hard. I had been away for so many years by that time, having moved to Chicago to finish high school living with my father's older brother, then moving to China and then Japan after university. We spoke as often as we could, and my father never failed to try to end the calls with "Listen, this must be costing you a fortune" or "Other than that, I don't know a hell of a lot." That last one crept into my vocabulary, and when it slipped out on the phone with my sister, years later, she told me never to say that to her again.

At the memorial, it felt wrong. I wanted it to be a small space for my sister and I to mourn our father. For my last living uncle and the cousins to be together to share stories. Instead, and I know that this is the right thing, the room was filled with people who knew him, or people who knew the part of him that people liked. A thing that strikes me, even now, is how many broken people were there. It was a specialty of my dad, collecting them, making them feel special, so he in turn could soak up their admiration and use it as proof of how great he was. Listening to people talk about how he always spoke to them from the heart made me think about how the man was an inveterate liar who told amazing tales of adventures he'd had, stories that had been debunked over the years. I wanted to tell them about the agonizing court mandated custody arrangement, and the two weekends a month where he would make it painfully clear that his girlfriends were always the priority, and we were loved as long as we didn't get in the way.

I wanted to yell at these people. I wanted to know how they could be lionizing the man I grew up with, a man who, to this day, I love very dearly, and miss, and just want to be able to call him and chat for a while. My sister and I knew how callous he could be, how quickly he would turn the light of his affection on a new and shiny person to add to his collection. Instead of returning home, I spent the next month cleaning out his ruin of a house because he'd moved in with a new woman, and ingrained himself with her family, leaving an unspeakable melange of hoarding and neglect for his children to sort through and largely discard. I wanted to tell all of these people speaking of how kind and generous he was, how bright and insightful he was just how wrong they were, how hoodwinked they'd been.

I did not say those things. I stood to the side, thanking them for speaking, telling them how much it meant to me to hear their words. When the wheel finally stopped turning, they were the lucky ones still enthralled by the act my father could put on, when he wanted to, and I didn't want to take that from them because I could still remember how good that felt.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:07 PM on September 4, 2021 [102 favorites]


abulafaba: So... The thing a friend told me during the fog of my mother's unexpected death at 59 that I repeat to friends in similar situations: "I love you. That fucking sucks." It's the only platitude I recall even scratching the surface of my internal emotional landscape, and didn't ask me to perform anything or process anything about our relationship.

One of the strongest memories I have of the aftermath of my late term pregnancy loss was a friend who gave me and my partner big hugs and pronounced, "This is fucking bullshit." She was right. It was fucking bullshit. I never thought about it this way, abulafaba, but you are bang on about its power lying in both being accurate and not asking the griever to perform or process anything about your relationship.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 6:20 PM on September 4, 2021 [20 favorites]


Reading this essay makes some things clearer about the previous essay Sedaris wrote about his sister's suicide (MeFi post) and the interview where he spoke about it (MeFi post). I spent some time re-reading the essay and interview and the Metafilter threads about them. Taken together, this essay about his dad's funeral, the one about Tiffany's suicide, and the essays in his book Calypso have struck me as Sedaris processing the reality of what his family and childhood were like as opposed to the sunny gloss he put on them in his (much) earlier work. This one gets the closest to the darkness that he turned into so many funny stories. I'm not really surprised by it, because it's so consistent with how his work has been heading for a while.

He faced quite a bit of criticism and was defensive about how he wrote and spoke about Tiffany. I wonder if his answers in that interview would be different if someone asked him the same questions about her today. I wonder if he could bring himself to say, now, that his parents were not doing their best when they sent Tiffany to Elan, and then dismissed and downplayed the abuse she received there when she was out of there and the truth about the place came out.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 6:39 PM on September 4, 2021 [27 favorites]


hurdy gurdy girl, I’m glad you shared your reflections on this vis a vis the piece he wrote about Tiffany. That single piece of his moved me from a devoted fan to never wanting to read anything else by him. I can’t add anything new to the criticism, but I hope you are right that perhaps he has come to some new reflections on his family, and particularly on Tiffany. Not that any of that would be easy to carry.

———
I’m sorry for your loss, David. I am so so sorry you lost Tiffany to death before your father and lost her to you and to the family in excruciating small steps before that. I am so sorry for the pain that must come from that terrible weight of revising your family stories while never being able to edit what happened.

It all just fucking sucks and hurts so bad. I hope you find your equilibrium soon.

With love —
posted by Silvery Fish at 7:35 PM on September 4, 2021 [2 favorites]


My dad passed away this June, and while I was fortunate not to have the complicated relationship with him that David Sedaris has with his dad, I can tell you that this essay is relatable as hell.
posted by chinese_fashion at 9:45 PM on September 4, 2021 [11 favorites]


I also get annoyed with “X lost his battle with Y.”

But as has been mentioned, even having people say the wrong thing is worse than having them say nothing.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:00 PM on September 4, 2021 [2 favorites]


People who don't know both my parents died years ago will occasionally be making conversation and ask me things like "are you going to see your parents for the holidays?" And it doesn't feel right to say "Nope, because they're dead!" because it's like a big fat brick of tragedy dropped in the middle of a conversation.

They don't know how long my parents have been dead, or how I feel about it. Saying "oh, well, my parents passed away several years ago," lets them off that hook. They might say "I'm sorry" but they don't have to do anything really and it will be fine. Because I'm using distancing/muting language, indicating that of course it's sad but I'm ok.

There's no good way to deal with death and nobody knows how to do it right. Not the mourners and not the people just trying to show compassion. We just need to be kind to each other.
posted by emjaybee at 10:21 PM on September 4, 2021 [23 favorites]


I'm very casual about saying it, but also my dad has been gone for 14 years, and it's long since old hat. I just say it and move along.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:06 PM on September 4, 2021 [2 favorites]


I think it would be more charitable to distinguish between people actively working to deny a history of abuse, and people who weren't in the know and are just trying to say things that aren't upsetting to the survivors.
posted by praemunire at 12:33 AM on September 5, 2021 [9 favorites]


I think of Sedaris as a fabulist among whose flights of fancy / cleverly crafted BS exist some nuggets of wisdom. I see a headline by him and I think "oh, it's that funny, clever crap artist." Which is what he is... along with a few other things.

In the MeFi post about Tiffany's suicide, Thorzdad wrote: "I'm left with an impression of a family which exists in name and surface appearance only."

I think that has been true all along. Sedaris is a talented humorist and a person with a heavy legacy, as is sister Amy, and he's found a steady audience. Even though I know not to trust the truth of all that he says, I'm still a member of that audience and will probably continue to be.

And I think his points about avoiding fluffy euphemism and communicating clearly about hard truths need to be made and remade, probably much more strongly, especially in US society.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 2:33 AM on September 5, 2021 [6 favorites]


I must be an outlier, as I very much preferred the people who said nothing at all after my mom died to the ones who said "We are praying for you". There are not enough words to express how much I hate that statement. It may have been because the Venn diagram of "people who expressed that platitude" and "people who will make a difficult time for someone else about themselves" was a full circle.
posted by theBigRedKittyPurrs at 5:31 AM on September 5, 2021 [10 favorites]


I lost my dad and my mum in reasonably quick succession, and aside from those very close to me, I remember far less what people said to me than I do which people said something to me. One of the sad things was people avoiding me because they clearly didn't know what to say, one of the lovely things was people who I didn't expect to know or be particularly interested going out of their way to say something. That really mattered to me, no matter how elegant or clumsy their phrasing was. That mattered not at all.

That said, I'd be really keen to avoid greater uptake of the word 'graduated' (as Seasparrow mentions above) as a euphemism, as in my career I've graduated over a hundred thousand people and that could get awkward.
posted by reynir at 5:51 AM on September 5, 2021 [9 favorites]


Saying "oh, well, my parents passed away several years ago," lets them off that hook. They might say "I'm sorry" but they don't have to do anything really and it will be fine. Because I'm using distancing/muting language, indicating that of course it's sad but I'm ok.

I use almost identical phrasing for the same reason (though for one parent, not two). A lot of the time all I need is to convey the information without creating an opening for a full conversation about the subject, which I've found more direct phrasing can lead to.

That said, I agree with Sedaris' point about how false some of the euphemisms and cliches can sound. "Transitioned," "is in a better place," and similar phrases are like nails on a blackboard to me, but I also understand that they represent people doing their best and trying to be kind. This is something where you get an A for effort for just trying, in my opinion, even if your attempt to convey sympathy falls totally flat.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:34 AM on September 5, 2021 [6 favorites]


The best thing someone said to me at my father's funeral was that he was a good CPA. My family didn't work especially well emotionally, and I felt that if dad was uninvolved with the family, at least it wasn't for nothing.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:45 AM on September 5, 2021 [10 favorites]


I live in a rural community and people tend to gather for funerals: you are either related by blood or marriage, or you are connected through work or volunteering or community league sports, or similar.

In total agreement with chavenet: say or do something. If you are part of the grieving party, if you have shown up to say your respects, then it's not as though you will be saying that one thing that helps the other person "make sense of it all" or truly comfort them. I've attended so many funerals where I can't recall what was said but the looks and gestures exchanged, the way a person embraces you, will stick around till it's my turn.

The only time something rubbed me the wrong way is attending a guy's memorial, knew him through my partner and also his partner, but otherwise he was the guy who ran the Sears outlet for the longest time. He was not a church-goer, but his partner was getting into that, so there were devotionals getting sung at his service and I don't think he'd have given a flying fuck for that but funerals are for the living. Thing is, the two singers really 'performed' their spirituality.. exaggerated movements and facial expressions.. I thought "you did not know this guy, what are you doing here performing your churchiness" it has stuck in my craw for years. Funerals/memorials are not for the dead, obviously, but the ones I have attended and helped to plan is partly to gather together, and there is always the idea "would the departed have been good with this?" There is a way you have them with you that day, and you hope that if they were there to say something they'd be okay with it all, and even if it's all about you and the rest of the still-breathing meatbags.

Sedaris is a writer. There is a way all writers are ruthless.. everything is material.. good god you all must know that by now.
posted by elkevelvet at 9:17 AM on September 5, 2021 [7 favorites]


When my abusive father died--er, passed--he had a massive stroke that left him conscious but unable to speak. I could talk to him, and it was clear he could hear and comprehend me, but he couldn't do more than emote with a few grunts. It made it easier to "make peace" with him that way, I suppose. "I love you, Dad." "Errmph."

I did his eulogy. I only talked about the good things he did of course. That wasn't hard--he was a complicated man, and he did many good things for the world despite mistreating most of those closest to him. But I always wondered whether those people in the audience, who didn't know him as closely as I did, actually thought he was as great a man as I portrayed him to be.

Surely they also knew we aren't supposed to badmouth people at their funerals, but did they buy into it nonetheless? Did I deceive them, and was it an ethical lapse if I did? I wonder what else I should have said sometimes...
posted by mikeand1 at 10:25 AM on September 5, 2021 [6 favorites]


And there is pretty much nothing else people are as uncomfortable with as the idea that death comes to us all. But, I didn’t get paid to write something for the New Yorker, so what do I know?
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur


I mean, if anyone would know about that...
posted by biogeo at 12:30 PM on September 5, 2021 [3 favorites]


What if you could just opt out of the rituals of memorializing someone who was relentlessly cruel to you?
posted by Horace Rumpole at 2:13 PM on September 5, 2021 [20 favorites]


Often times people say the wrong thing to the grieving because there is nothing right to say.
posted by MrJM at 2:20 PM on September 5, 2021 [6 favorites]


An important thing to keep in mind is that the people who are grieving also typically have no idea what they are doing or how to do it. Particularly if they don't exist within the strictures and rituals of a religious or cultural tradition that pre-orders things for them so they don't have to make decisions.
posted by srboisvert at 3:03 PM on September 5, 2021 [5 favorites]


What if you could just opt out of the rituals of memorializing someone who was relentlessly cruel to you?

Yeah, this. So much this.
posted by WalkerWestridge at 4:41 PM on September 5, 2021 [5 favorites]


What if you could just opt out of the rituals of memorializing someone who was relentlessly cruel to you?

You can - though tongues would wag, if it matters to you within that particular set of circumstances.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:58 PM on September 5, 2021


Sympathy and (insofar possible) understanding to those who have dealt with someone making someone else's funeral All About Them. My dad did this... to my mom at the wake he threw for her. Which was stunningly awful and I hated being there and hated every godawful second of my dad's self-aggrandizement...

... but one moment redeemed the whole ordeal. An elderly lady hooked up to an oxygen machine stopped me as I passed by to whisper hoarsely, “You know, you look just like your momma?”

Yeah, I know. There have always been differences, but you wouldn’t know most of them from the black-and-white photos that are what we have of Mom at my then-age and younger. So I chuckled. “People have been mistaking a couple of the photos of Mom for me.” Perfectly true.

She smiled back. “You’re beautiful just like your momma,” she whispered.

Okay, okay, look. I am not beautiful. Mom was not beautiful either, though she was good-looking when she was young. But every once in a long while, when certain people say that you’re beautiful, you are, even if it’s only for thirty damned seconds.

I was beautiful for thirty seconds. Until I teared up and had to make my farewell and walk away. And... it was worth it, for that.

I wish all of us moments like that, amid whatever complicated experience of grief we're having.
posted by humbug at 6:50 PM on September 5, 2021 [34 favorites]


What if sixty-four years of constant criticism and belittlement was enough, and I’m actually fine with my father and me going our separate ways, him in a cooler at the funeral home and me here at the kids’ table.

I am eternally grateful that my father died during Covid (of cancer) because we couldn't hold a funeral and fuck if I would have been able to stand up there and lie about how "he did his best" and how sad I was. And the eulogy would absolutely have fallen to me, just like every other damned thing. At some point during his hospice I must have gotten through toy mother that I would not participate in a farce of a eulogy because even though Coivd restrictions have lessened so that we could hold a funeral now, she hasn't moved forward with planning.

My eldest brother, however, has fully fallen into the "he did his best" bullshit and let me just tell you how immensely gaslighting that feels.
posted by cooker girl at 7:11 PM on September 5, 2021 [9 favorites]


What if you could just opt out of the rituals of memorializing someone who was relentlessly cruel to you?

It's powerful, and has the side effect, if you're a woman, of increasing your leverage in family relationships, because you become the One Who Will Fucking Walk Out On Your Shit.
posted by praemunire at 7:39 PM on September 5, 2021 [19 favorites]


I wouldn't used "passed" which seems to be a shortening of "passed away," or "transitioned" but both of those terms seem common in black churches. The one that gets to me is the increasing insistence, even in news stories, on saying someone was "surrounded by friends and family" at their death.
It always makes me think someone is competing to prove that the dead person was popular.
posted by etaoin at 8:08 PM on September 5, 2021 [3 favorites]


Sedaris is a writer. There is a way all writers are ruthless.. everything is material.. good god you all must know that by now.

from Your Dog Dies by Raymond Carver

it gets run over by a van.
you find it at the side of the road
and bury it.
you feel bad about it.
you feel bad personally,
but you feel bad for your daughter
because it was her pet,
and she loved it so.
she used to croon to it
and let it sleep in her bed.
you write a poem about it.
you call it a poem for your daughter,
about the dog getting run over by a van
and how you looked after it,
took it out into the woods
and buried it deep, deep,
and that poem turns out so good
you're almost glad the little dog
was run over, or else you'd never
have written that good poem.
posted by Orlop at 1:37 AM on September 6, 2021 [9 favorites]


At Quaker funerals (in my strain of Quakerism) there's no eulogy.It's just like a regular meeting for worship, everybody gathered in silence and speaking as led, though there's an expectation that there's a lower bar for speaking.

I remember a funeral, years ago, for a woman who had been both wonderful and awful. She was a leader in social movements in our area going back to the early Civil Rights era and Vietnam, for instance, and was renowned for getting things done. There's a story about her putting on a suit and just walking herself into the Pentagon and into the office of I can't remember who—McNamara?

But she also was mean and difficult. When I was pregnant the first time, she told me the only way to get things done was to completely baby-proof a room and put the baby and toddler in there with some toys and snacks. "They'll just fall asleep on the floor when they get tired." I was appalled.

When our meeting approved same-sex civil unions in the early nineties, she would lie about it to people who called the meeting phone, because it wasn't a decision she agreed with. At that time, we didn't have our own meetinghouse but rented space in a church, so our phone was kept in a member's home. This precipitated the removal of the phone to somebody else's house.

Anyway: her funeral meeting for worship, Quakers and people she'd done organizing and activism with, and politicians of the local kind, and people stood up to speak and, with affected and admiration and humor, were absolutely honest about her. It was wonderful. It was true, for one thing, and it made space for the way she could be horrible one day and incredibly kind the next, and for the way we might all have experienced her differently and seen different sides of her.

It was the best funeral I've ever been to. It allowed me to laugh about her through my anger, and to dispel my more negative feelings so I didn't have to carry them—cathartic is the word I'm looking for.At the meal afterward, we seemed to feel united even if we'd never met before, and we enjoyed ourselves.

Rest in peace, M.A.
posted by Orlop at 1:53 AM on September 6, 2021 [27 favorites]


I've been reading these later pieces by David Sedaris in the New Yorker, and I'm very grateful for his words and outlook. I've been told all my life that my parents "did their best"; that I need to be more understanding of them and less hurt by....the hurt....; and so forth. Mostly I feel I'm being told, "Shhh. Please don't talk about this stuff; it makes us uncomfortable; you're messing up our social norms," but that leads nowhere for me. So I'll not be there when all those other folks say those sticky sugary nothings; I'll be living my life for me, and to hell with them.
posted by winesong at 7:15 AM on September 6, 2021 [11 favorites]


I keep thinking about this because I know the complexities of sibling relationships as they stay in or break out of abusive family structures, but...if I'd had a sibling sent off to a torture school like Elan, I can't help but feel that that would have featured a bit more heavily in my essay about my feelings about my father's death.
posted by praemunire at 12:14 PM on September 6, 2021


True confession: only now just realized that David Sedaris and Dave Barry are not the same person. Cus lately I was like man when did Dave Barry get dark
posted by St. Peepsburg at 7:36 PM on September 6, 2021 [5 favorites]


I keep thinking about this because I know the complexities of sibling relationships as they stay in or break out of abusive family structures, but...if I'd had a sibling sent off to a torture school like Elan, I can't help but feel that that would have featured a bit more heavily in my essay about my feelings about my father's death.

I can’t help but wonder if he will ever feel ready to write that direct of an essay, praemunire. He has really avoided the topic of what really happened to Tiffany at Elan, even when asked directly about it. This is the first essay of his I remember reading where he’s even come close to implying his parents were abusive, and as it is even this one is not particularly direct.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 9:00 PM on September 6, 2021 [4 favorites]


I always got the feeling that his dad was difficult to deal with and his mom might have been less so. Also he may not really feel qualified to talk about Elan since he wasn't the one sent there.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:56 PM on September 6, 2021 [3 favorites]


Also he may not really feel qualified to talk about Elan since he wasn't the one sent there.

Given the dismissive way he referred to it in his essay on Tiffany's suicide, I doubt this explanation.
posted by praemunire at 10:41 PM on September 6, 2021 [2 favorites]


True confession: only now just realized that David Sedaris and Dave Barry are not the same person. Cus lately I was like man when did Dave Barry get dark

Dave Barry's essay on his mother's death by suicide.
posted by FencingGal at 7:21 AM on September 7, 2021 [7 favorites]


I read a fair amount of the critiques and responses to the essays David wrote about Tiffany and have come to the conclusion that he does not discuss it because there is no way to do so in a manner that will not cause great upset - he is damned if he does and damned if he does not. As much as he seems to be at peace with being perceived as a jerk, Tiffany is an especially sensitive subject and I think he taken a wiser path of not discussing it at all. Since they were (as much as I recall) estranged at her death and she did not want him writing about her when she was alive, this seems like the most honorable option.
posted by theBigRedKittyPurrs at 7:38 AM on September 7, 2021 [12 favorites]


you better believe that if Sedaris wrote at any length about his sister and the time at Elan, there would be as many or more criticisms of his ghoulish opportunism. this is just one of those examples of the leisure class needing to share their opinions on a thing. if you are a reader, you have/are/will be implicated in this whole business and the "should they write/not write about this" seems, at best, misguided.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:58 AM on September 7, 2021 [9 favorites]


Now We are Five. David Sedaris's essay about his sister, if anyone wants to assess his grief and writing style.
posted by mecran01 at 1:29 PM on September 7, 2021 [4 favorites]


A few weeks after these messages were written, Tiffany ran away, and was subsequently sent to a disciplinary institution in Maine called Élan. According to what she told us later, it was a horrible place. She returned home in 1980, having spent two years there, and from that point on none of us can recall a conversation in which she did not mention it. She blamed the family for sending her off, but we, her siblings, had nothing to do with it. Paul, for instance, was ten when she left. I was twenty-one. For a year, I sent her monthly letters. Then she wrote and asked me to stop. As for my parents, there were only so many times they could apologize. “We had other kids,” they said in their defense. “You think we could let the world stop on account of any one of you?”
My position is not that it would be ghoulish to write about it, it's that it was extraordinarily cruel to write about it in this way. Why did she keep bringing it up, sheesh, it was two years ago and it wasn't any of their faults, and why couldn't she just let it go!
posted by praemunire at 8:24 PM on September 7, 2021 [2 favorites]


My point is this.. to the extent that any writing reveals things, and Sedaris's way of revealing things is certainly a way, supposing he'd revealed his sister Tiffany to you, and her experience at Elan School, in precisely a palatable and satisfying way for you?

At the end of the day we are discussing writing, and its impact on each of us. Which is fine.
posted by elkevelvet at 8:35 AM on September 8, 2021


What would be "palatable and satisfying" for me would be if, in a piece where he is surely identifying his father as a person who was harmful to him, he would make some amends for previously and publicly describing the abuse inflicted on his sister by his father as though she was being a tedious whiny bitch about it, by acknowledging the harm his father actually did to her. This is the kind of realization a lot of people in bad family situations have years later, when they're far enough clear of the situation to see how other people in it with them may have struggled, too.

I really don't understand your point. I don't belong to the camp that regards writing about one's loved ones' personal lives as some sort of betrayal, but if you choose to write about them in particular ways, you invite people to consider what kind of person you are to do so. I don't follow Sedaris closely at all. I wouldn't even know that Tiffany had ever existed, or what had happened to her, if he hadn't chosen to write about her. But since he himself explicitly and specifically chose to, I can't read his piece about his feelings about what his father did to him without having that in my mind, without recognizing it as a key omission.

There seems to be some overall implication that it's ghoulish or entitled to judge this kind of writing, but this is not some rando's therapy journal or even a celebrity's leaked emails. These are deliberate and considered pieces he published for money and fame.
posted by praemunire at 11:14 AM on September 8, 2021 [2 favorites]


"ghoulish or entitled to judge this kind of writing" I don't think we're communicating very well. We differ on what we are getting from some written work, and that's fine. Good day.
posted by elkevelvet at 2:11 PM on September 8, 2021


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