OPINION

PHILIP MARTIN: A death in the family

It's confusing.

You come in on Monday morning, already annoyed by how much you have to do before you can get to what you want to do and you get pulled aside. Your colleague tells you Michael Storey is dead, and you catch yourself feeling what you thought you could only fake: shock.

He was just here. He looked good. Hale, you might say, if you were searching for just the right word.

You sit there, for a minute or an hour, and watch the faces of the others as they find out. The reflex is to gasp. To pull a hand to one's face. It looks like pantomime. It's not.

You read the obit--lovely, tender, funny. There are stories in the newspaper, stories you read online. Facebook posts. People write letters.

What you don't want to turn into is the eulogy machine. That's what it could be, something easy and automatic, lazy and above all advertising of one's own sensitivity and virtue. People die all the time and mostly we grieve because their deaths remind us of our own mortality: "It is the blight man was born for/It is Margaret you mourn for."

. . .

Not everyone can do this job.

"Journalism is the art of coming too late as early as possible. I'll never master that," Swedish writer Stig Dagerman wrote in the midst of some beautiful journalism he committed while traveling through Germany in 1946, chronicling the plight of the defeated people for Swedish evening tabloid Expressen and later collected in the book German Autumn.

Dagerman meant to describe the ordinary life of a people reduced to digging through ruins and relying on the kindness of a world that had decided they deserved to suffer. His colleagues looked askance.

"A French journalist of high repute advised me with the best intentions and for the sake of objectivity to read German newspapers instead of looking at German dwellings or sniffing in German cooking-pots," Dagerman wrote. Yet he persisted.

And German Autumn succeeds in describing what some had dismissed as "indescribable"--Dagerman stacks concrete fact on concrete fact and accords every story a measure of empathy and dignity, whether it's that of a former Nazi prosecutor surviving in relative comfort--his children eat real butter--or the concentration camp survivor who sees no point in even trying to relate the details of his struggle.

Dagerman was wrong. He was, for a while, the best kind of journalist.

And so, when he was 31 years old, he locked himself in his garage, started his car, and went to sleep.

Michael Storey went to sleep too, but it was in a house filled with family. With grandchildren. With noisy love. His story was not sad. He didn't kill himself. This is a bad example.

You don't know what he had in common with Stig Dagerman other than an impulse to describe what is indescribable in a way that more conventional minds might misunderstand.

Michael Storey ventriloquized a cat. A cat who spoke in koans and riddles and vexed the literate-minded and dull. A cat who was sometimes frighteningly prescient about how credulous we were becoming. He gave that cat a damn good run and did other things besides, but this is not an eulogy.

It's confusing.

. . .

What other people don't understand about us is how ragtag we are. We are not holy people or particularly brave or even better than the average. We are here because here is what would have us, with our half-written novels and our bloodied egos. We are here because we like it here, because here offers us something more than a living wage. It offers us a community of the similarly compulsive and cracked, of hunters and peckers, of people appreciative of the opportunity to try to make sense of what's out there even as they understand that there is no sense to be made.

We tell ourselves it is a calling. We sometimes take more lucrative jobs but come back, sometimes crawling, always aware of the limits.

We sit here with our deadlines and expense chits and our aging readers and we practice a naive and earnest craft that we don't dare call (but secretly hope might be) art. We recognize each other by the grace notes, by the rhythms, the secret time-keeping heart of it. By the balance of a sentence. The aura-haunted word.

There are all kinds of ways to get at the thing that we don't speak of, that the vulgar might suppress.

You think maybe it is a shame your tribe is dying out.

Newspaper people have always been of low caste, with magpie eyes and loud shirts. We stake out the back gate, we rustle through the dumpster, reveling in our inappropriateness. We used to have parties in ramshackle houses, with fistfights and petty jealousies and newsroom affairs and sometimes the police called. Maybe some of us still do.

You look around and you understand that change is the most ordinary thing in the world, that it's folly to believe that anything can last, and you start to understand the despair that infects the Stig Dagermans of the world, all those existential questions that we've all been worrying since Shakespeare woke us to the human condition. From Hamlet to The Good Place the only question really worth asking has always been "to be or not to be?"

"I can't go on. I'll go on," answers Sam Beckett's nameless one.

You will go on. Not because you lack imagination, or because the inevitable is so scary, but because there is deliciousness in the world and the example of people like Michael Storey who seemed to have acquired all any of us might hope to, which is a certain satisfaction. A certain enviable equanimity.

A life lived well.

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MovieStyle on 10/14/2018

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