Still Kicking-Art Buchwald that is.....

BERIGAN · November 13, 2006

Still Kicking

By JAMES KAPLAN

Published: November 12, 2006

The deathbed scene, mawkish or moving, is a convention as old as literature. When it comes to the deathbed memoir, however, Art Buchwald would appear to have the field all to himself.

TOO SOON TO SAY GOODBYE

By Art Buchwald.

189 pp. Random House. $17.95.

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In February 2006, the 80-year-old columnist’s health came to a crisis. He had been undergoing kidney dialysis; now, blood clots in his right foot necessitated amputation of the foot and lower leg. And there was more bad news: a dye used in the angiogram to diagnose the clots had caused Buchwald’s kidneys to fail entirely. Because of his age, he was a poor candidate for a transplant. His list of options was therefore short and stark: He could either be in dialysis for the rest of his life, or not. If he did nothing, his doctors told him, he would almost certainly die within weeks. At the thought of a life with one leg and hooked up to a dialysis machine, “I decided — too much,” he writes in “Too Soon to Say Goodbye,” his brief, moving, occasionally hilarious chronicle of a death postponed.

While riding an elevator to his room in a Washington acute-care facility, Buchwald noticed a sign for a hospice in the same building. He took a tour, and decided he’d found the place where he wanted to spend his final days. Except that the days turned into months, and the months turned out not to be final.

In short, Art Buchwald’s life took a strange turn: it continued. A few weeks after he moved from acute care to final care, his kidneys, for reasons no one seems to understand, started working again. He wound up spending five months in the Washington Home and Hospice, eating, drinking and making as merry as anyone with a newly amputated leg could. His chief pleasure, besides scarfing down the lavish offerings in the many food baskets he received, was greeting a long, long parade of visitors, a train worthy of a modern Voltaire (Buchwald called the hospice reception room his “salon”). The guests ranged from old schoolmates to the columnist’s many high-octane friends — the likes of Tom Brokaw and Ben Bradlee and Ethel Kennedy and Russell Baker and Jack Valenti and Donald Rumsfeld, as well as John Glenn, the queen of Swaziland and the commandant of the United States Marine Corps. “It is amazing,” Buchwald says, “how many people visit if you are in a convenient location and they’ve been told you’re going to die.”

His visitors, he notes, were often nervous at first — shy in the face of death — but soon, because of Buchwald’s irrepressible personality, found themselves lightening up. “Some of them have such a good time,” he notes, “they come back again and again.”

Which was just the way the gregarious columnist liked it. In fact, much of his hospice experience — the food, the guests, the radio and TV interviews, the thousands of letters he received — not only met his outsize need for attention but seemed to give him a positively Tom Sawyeresque glee. In the book’s epilogue, Buchwald shamelessly quotes his prospective pallbearers’ prewritten eulogies in their entirety.

But the book also has a serious — though not solemn — undertone. Amid an old man’s pardonably digressive reminiscences (some of which will nevertheless feel familiar to readers of Buchwald’s other books), he speaks feelingly about the realities of death: living wills; the grief of other, less fortunate hospice residents and their families; and the strange American habit of trying to ignore life’s end. Art Buchwald has looked straight on at his own “dirt nap,” with liberating results. “People told me,” he writes, “they loved talking to someone who wasn’t afraid to discuss death.”

As of this writing, Buchwald was still in the discussion stages. One hopes he’s planning a sequel.

James Kaplan is a co-author, with Jerry Lewis, of “Dean and Me (A Love Story).” He is writing a biography of Frank Sinatra.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/books/review/Kaplan.t.html