We interrupt the greeting to inform you that this is not a Father’s Day post. I believe that all the “relationship” days (Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Grandparent’s Day, Valentine’s Day…) are best served by private observance and lose their impact when co-opted by those who are not personally involved in the relationship, particularly by corporations, colleagues or strangers. I hope that if your father is living you remember him; and if he has passed that you are able to admire at least one aspect of him, and if that is not the case, or if you are a father yourself, I hope the day passes in a way that brings your comfort and — wouldn’t it be lovely — joy.)
Trigger warning - this piece is about an obituary.
Hello, those of you who are still around:
It is an odd thing to write an obituary. You have to sort through the awards and notable events, and so many things get tossed aside that form the core of the person who has departed. For example: do you include the fact that someone did the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle every week in pen and felt it was a success when she did it in under an hour?
We lost my husband’s mother this week. For 21 years, Natalie De Voe was a beloved docent at the Met, and on and off a docent at the Rubin as well. In addition to these appointments, she volunteered at her alma mater as a Harvard admissions interviewer and for many years was a much sought-after Big Apple Greeter. When she was working, my mother in law was at Hearst Publications. Her resume was filled with volunteerism.
But she was also an avid knitter, an avid reader, and an utterly devoted Nana to my two kids, and a strong, vibrant, and endlessly supportive presence in my own life and creative career—she attended all my acting performances until I started writing, then she read all my stories and books and attended all the Pen Parentis Literary Salons that I hosted. She was always there for us.
As I type up the long and official names of the memorable tours she led (the head of Indian Art at the Met actually used the word “legendary”), I am reminded of her waiting for my son at “her” museum after high school every Tuesday to take him to whatever exhibit he wanted to see, whether the arms and armor, the guitars, the illuminated manuscripts, or the mummies - or taking my daughter and a friend or two to each The Met’s over-the-top Costume Institute exhibits since they were preschoolers and letting the girls do some guided window-shopping among the Diors or the Alexander McQueens. These kids will have a lifelong love of museums, not only as places to learn about history and culture but also as warm loving homes for the art that they protect. Natalie’s expertise was in Islamic and Indian and Himalayan Art, and her relationship to art was as a personal ambassador, but one who was able to make these distant, ancient cultures feel immediately relevant, not only in their own time, but by association, to our own. She recognized that we too live in history and that cheeseburgers, a bestselling paperback, and a scrawled crayon drawing might just as easily be the only things left to explain us as a piece of broken pottery or a jeweled icon.
What of all this does one put in an obituary?
I know next to nothing about her childhood except the names of her parents - she kept those stories to herself and outlived her entire family. Over the years she gently polished her own life events into a smooth arc of travel and volunteerism, a polishing that I guess we all do as we age: I recall how guilty I felt the first time I cut a two-page work resume down to just one page. I felt I was lying! Imagine if you had eighty-five years that you needed to distill into a one-sentence introduction. What does one say when one has lived three lifetimes?
Our life circumstances constantly evolve and our friend groups shift around. I remember the feeling of extreme exclusion I felt when my father’s closest friends spoke their condolences at his funeral - I hadn’t even heard most of their names, much less their shared stories—and I had only lived away from my father fifteen years or less when he died. How much more difficult is it to assemble a life story for a person whom you met once she was already retired? And yet I spent 30 years as her friend, she was an iconic New Yorker, and one that many people (myself included) emulate and hope to be like: she was out nearly every night until the pandemic, attending art openings, concerts, galleries, lectures, theaters both intimate and Broadway, movies both blockbuster and art, and reading vastly and widely - she had both a nonfiction and fiction book club, and she never missed a single performance of mine or my kids. Even to the end of her life, she signed up to watch the Pen Parentis Literary Salons online, not just to support me, but to discover new authors to feed her insatiable appetite for culture. She spent the pandemic learning about Asian Art in online classes and was delighted to share regular events like The Frick’s Cocktails with the Curator and other online opportunities.
We all edit our own life story - those of you who are writing memoirs know this process intimately. We try to make our stories meaningful by omission and redaction and sometimes hyperbole—a process made glaringly obvious whenever you hear a long-married couple tell a story together.
WRITING NEWS:
It feels so strange to say so, but I have a new story that is coming out this week in an anthology that is very fun and should appeal to anyone who enjoys crossover fiction or mashups. Tumbled Tales is the name of this anthology that “upends genre conventions” and my story, All Clear, is a literary fiction take on the aftermath of a Godzilla attack on Houston. I did a half-hour interview with the publisher, Wandering Wave Press, and clips will be showing up soon on social media. I’ll link to some as they come out.
Also, the story in my collection that contributed the title line (“Still Life with Cherries”) is now available in the print copy of Santa Barbara Literary Journal #9. Here’s the purchase link if you are building a library of my work.
In other very strange news, my story collection has been removed from the Amazon search engine listings. Apparently you have to have a minimum of 25 reviews. If you would like to leave a review of the book and help me get to 25 so that the book can be found with just its title, that would be much appreciated. Here’s the direct link to the review page. (Thank you to those of you who have already left reviews both here and on Goodreads - I have smiled so much reading your public thoughts and commentary!)
Random Final Thought:
My son asked me this and I hadn’t ever thought of it, but now I can’t stop thinking about it. When you turn on the tap, the water pressure makes the water flow. But turning off the tap doesn’t make the water pressure stop. So where is the pressurized water flowing to, when it isn’t flowing out of your tap?
This also goes for emotions. Perhaps a fitting way to end a post on Father’s Day.
I was touched and inspired and suitably in awe reading about the amazing Natalie De Voe.
I have read tributes to myself that I thought were filled with triteness or which valued things that I didn't much value myself. Maybe the ideal obituary would be edited by the soon-to-be-departed, not so that it could be bowdlerized, but because I think a person knows what her life was or was not about. Tributes and even critical accounts, of course, say as much about the people who write them as the people they are written about. The shallowness can be on the part of the author, not the subject. There is a reason why a Philip Roth was so stingy in granting access to his papers for a biography, although his ultimate choice backfired horribly.
I used to be consumed with the idea of writing a complete and definitive autobiography and then realized it would be impossible, and themes were the way to go instead. That first conception of an accounting of a life is hard to let go of, though, I think because we have a strong desire in life and literature to really know people, and that does seem to require that there can't be these holes, that everything must be taken stock of. It's destructive of the idea of knowing somebody to be asked a basic question and not to be able to answer it. "Knowing" is multifaceted, though. There are as many facets as school subjects. It's o.k. to get As in some areas, Fs in others. Better that, I say, than universal Bs. The holes don't mean you didn't know someone, and I always trust my instinct and experience over external facts.
Leaving parts out of one's life as a practicality in response to volume is one thing, but not wanting to talk about some things is another. I can't completely separate my desire to leave an adequate account of my life from my desire to confess some things, I have to say. I guess life is in a sense a squaring of accounts, and if you don't lay out all of the bad stuff, it's hard to be at peace.
Your mother-in-law sounds like an extraordinary person. Thinking of your whole family -