Week in Review (June 3-7)
7-Eleven Slurpees, Bribing Cops, Strange Obituaries and who is Gordon Gundrum
“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
Franz Kafka
Lost in Time
Franz makes a profound point. Life’s meaning is intimately tied to its transience. Life is a fragile and fleeting experience. The awareness of our own mortality serves as a powerful motivator to embrace life fully. It reminds us that every moment is precious, and that we should make the most of our limited time.
It’s been a troubling 2024 for me so far with health issues. A couple were serious, some were aggravating but I rebounded, and a few just won’t go away. My birthday is next week, which reminds me that I have lived more of my life than I have left to live. I remember as a little boy wondering if the day would ever come when I’d be a real grown up. But suddenly, decades of living barreled by, and I miss those driveway basketball games at Tyler Young’s house down the street, and bike rides to 7-Eleven for Slurpees.
It’s normal to think more about death the older we become. In both my professional and personal life, I have been at the side of many people in the final hours, minutes and breaths of life. I’ve had two brushes with death myself and miraculously survived.
I don’t know why writing this week’s article about Murray Bookchin was so emotionally impactful. I begin the article by pointing out that 167,123 people die every day on planet earth, and are completely forgotten two to three generations after their death. Look at that picture below. That’s Murray. He was there, standing on that river bridge in his favorite Navy blue button up and frumpish hat, with pencils and notepad in his front shirt pocket.
Murray Bookchin died July 30, 2006 in an apartment in downtown Burlington, Vermont at 85 years of age. Gone. Forgotten. He was born, lived, died, and is now lost in time. Despite being the pioneer of social ecology and elevating planet earth to the center of Western philosophy, hardly anyone knows who he was and he is largely long-forgotten. To most people, Murray Bookchin never existed. Something about this bothers me.
It seems cruel that people are so easily forgotten as if they never even existed. A person lives their entire life with all its tragedies and triumphs, joys and sorrows, wounds and scars, love and lessons… don’t they at least deserve to be remembered?
Maybe it’s me. Perhaps I don’t like the idea of one day being completely forgotten without a trace, and lost in time.
Part of my work as a certified Spiritual Director, religious trauma counselor, and founder of the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality, is working with people in terms of their existential health. This includes coping with the givens of human existence, such as death. Death anxiety is something many people struggle with, which I discuss extensively in my article, Do you fear death? How to cultivate healthy death acceptance.
Comedian Steven Wright said, “I intend to live forever. So far, so good.” I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want to die. Even with all the work I’ve done around the issue of death, there’s something discomforting about knowing that I will one day be one of those 167,123 people who pass away and soon forgotten. Whatever one believes about the afterlife, you can’t get back the life you’re living now.
Seneca wrote:
“No one is so ignorant as not to know that some day he must die. Nevertheless when death draws near he turns, wailing and trembling, looking for a way out. Wouldn’t you think a man an utter fool if he burst into tears because he didn’t live a thousand years ago? A man is as much a fool for shedding tears because he isn’t going to be alive a thousand years from now. There’s no difference between the one and the other - you didn’t exist and you won’t exist - you’ve no concern with either period.”
Ask one hundred people on the street who Murray Bookchin is, and you’ll get one hundred blank stares. Or scroll through a list of the top one hundred philosophers - won’t find him there either. That’s why he made it into my series, “Philosophers You Have never Heard Of.”
Why did Murray Bookchin’s vanishing into obscurity trouble me? As I mentioned, people die every day who we don’t know even existed. Beyond his living loved ones, Murray Bookchin is in fact remembered by some people in certain circles, as niche as they might be. He has a legacy of ideas in political philosophy and social ecology that continue to this day.
Nameless and Nobody
The whole matter got me thinking. Are people’s lives more or less significant, depending upon how long they are remembered and venerated? It kind of seems so, doesn’t it? The more you accomplish, the more remembered you will be. Right? We all know John Lennon, no one knows John Smith. We‘ve heard of Susan B. Anthony, but not Susan Brown.
But this logic that the magnitude of one’s accomplishments determines the duration of their remembrance, doesn’t really add up. We think of Martin Luther King, Jr. or Rosa Parks when it comes to the the civil rights movement, but what about all the unsung heroes who played a key role. Take Gordon Gundrum, for example. You’ve never heard of him. He’s the white 25-year-old park ranger in the photo below who stood next to Martin Luther King to protect him at the Lincoln Memorial during his I Have a Dream speech. Gordon didn’t even get a Wiki page.
Most of the greatest achievements, movements, and advances of human history happened on the shoulders of nameless others, who we never knew existed. Sometimes the fate of civilization rests in the hands of unsuspecting figures, like a little Hobbit named Frodo.
June is Pride Month. This week I also wrote an article titled, From Stonewall to Stonewalling, which traces the roots of the gay rights movement back to the Stonewall Riots of 1969. Ever heard of Joseph Ambrosini? I bet not. See that photograph below? It is the only known photograph taken during the first night of the riots. It was taken by a freelance photographer. Yep, you guessed it - Joseph Ambrosini.
His photo appeared in the New York Daily News on Sunday, June 29, 1969. It sparked public outrage, which galvanized public sentiment against the harassments of the gay community. Several years later, historian Jonathan Ned Katz attempted to track him down. He found the name Joseph Ambrosini in the New York City telephone book, called, and spoke to a relative who informed him that Joseph had died.
My first book is titled, Divine Nobodies: Shedding Religion to Find God (and the unlikely people who help you). Despite receiving my seminary education from some of the top theological professors in the world, it was a Waffle House waitress and tire salesman who most impacted my spiritual journey. These were the “divine nobodies” and the “unlikely people” who taught me about life and faith in ways I could have never learned in a classroom.
Reading the Obituaries
I have an unusual admission. I read stranger’s obituaries. It started in grad school. Remember those things called newspapers? I paid for a daily newspaper subscription to the Chicago Tribune. I did this for two reasons. First, it was my conviction that in an effort to cultivate a robust intellectual life, I should stay atop the news and current issues. I determined that the Chicago Tribune was essential reading for this. Secondly, I was obsessed with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, and I had the foresight to save every Chicago Tribune sport’s section that covered the iconic victories, milestones and championships of MJ and the Bulls.
Reading the newspaper cover to cover, included the comics and obituaries. I found the obituaries fascinating. To refresh your memory, an obituary (obit for short) is a short article about a recently deceased person. In local newspapers, an obituary may be published for any local resident upon death.
An obituary is a written announcement sharing the news that someone has passed away. It typically acts as a summary of a loved one’s life and legacy. It also informs people that someone has died and includes details about their funeral, burial, and memorial service. What people say in an obituary about their loved one can be touching, inspiring, heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious.
For example, below is a picture of Lucien Conte. He goes by “Frenchy”. He died yesterday at age 90 and his obituary was in the Chicago Tribune. The obituary reads that he “arrived in heaven.”
According to the obituary, Lucien was born December 20, 1933 on the French Riviera. He met the love of his life, Lilian, in 1957 and they moved to Chicago in 1960 in pursuit of the American Dream. His obituary went on to say, “The move from Chicago involved a good job in Hammond, a new red convertible, speeding excessively on the Chicago Skyway, a brief police chase and revocation of Frenchy’s Illinois drivers license after trying to bribe a police officer as he’d seen in American movies and TV shows.”
Frenchy and Liliane became American citizens and, according to the obituary, Frenchy celebrated by “… painting a map/flag of the United States on the side of his garage for the 1976 Bicentennial (his three teenage kids were horrified).”
Surviving Frenchy are three children, eight grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. The obituary concludes by saying, “In lieu of services, Frenchy’s family will accompany him home to the south of France where his ashes will be placed with his beloved wife Liliane in an iconic mountain village near Nice.”
At risk of seeming odd, I’m not the only one who reads obituaries. “We’ve found that people of all ages are happy to part with their hard-earned money to read obituaries,” said Harry Quetteville, former editor of the famous obituaries page at The Telegraph in London. Harry Quetteville published the book, Thinker, Failure, Soldier, Jailer: An Anthology of Great Lives in 365 Days, in which he wrote, “Our obituaries have a big, loyal following — not just in Britain, but around the world. Only an adrenaline junkie or a completely unimaginative person could be bored by obits.”
Quetteville says the fascination is easily explained: it comes down to great storytelling, evocative snapshots that are quickly digestible in a way biographies and other nonfiction genres aren’t. Reading obits can make you feel the fear and pride of an immigrant who started over in a new country, the awe of a mountain climber, the pain of an addict, the patience of a schoolteacher. In this way, stories sparked by death can make us feel more alive. They prompt introspection. Obituaries are a reminder of what a completely average person can do.
If you’re interested in starting an obituary obsession, there are a few resources you could explore. You can browse obituaries by high school, college, city, newspaper, etc, at Legacy.com. A couple interesting Twitter obituary offerings are: TelegraphOrbits and NYT Obituaries. The Economist has a quite extensive and fascinating obituary section.
For extra credit, here a few interesting obituary books:
The Last Word: The New York Times Book of Obituaries and Farewells : A Celebration of Unusual Lives
Obit: Inspiring Stories of Ordinary People Who Led Extraordinary Lives
The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries
Thinker, Failure, Soldier, Jailer: An Anthology of Great Lives in 365 Days
The culture of obituaries has changed greatly over the years. For one thing, newspaper numbers are dwindling. The shift in death coverage, however, is more importantly due to the rise of the digital age and social media.
The word “obituary” comes from the Latin “obit,” or death. The word was first used to refer to death notices printed in British papers in the early 18th century, and the tradition followed to America. In the earliest days, American newspapers didn’t have reporters; families would supply death notices. The “news obituary” started in the early 19th century in America, when voracious readers of local news demanded a significant number of local papers.
For a while, the obit beat assignment signaled that you were on the lowest rung of the newsroom hierarchy, a stigma that lasted up through WWII. But that began to change, in no small part due to an editor named Alden Whitman, who wrote obituaries in the New York Times from 1965 to 1976. He viewed them as feature writing, as biographies, and was famously profiled in 1966 in an Esquire story called “Mr. Bad News.”
Today, especially for larger news outlets, obituaries are objective features, written by journalists. Margalit Fox, a well-known obituary writer, has penned over 1,200 obituaries for the New York Times and discusses this in an interview, Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism.
It does my heart good to remember that there are those who are devoted to keeping the remembrance of ordinary people alive, and view this work as sacred.
Weekend Crossword Challenge
Speaking of newspapers, it’s time for another crossword puzzle challenge! It’s based on my Substack articles in May. Let me know if you complete it. Was it too easy? Would you be interested in more challenging ones?
In Summary
No one knows Murray Bookchin, Gordon Gundrum, Joseph Ambrosini or Lucien “Frenchy” Conte, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth remembering.
Obituaries are reminders that the meaning of life is that it stops.
Attempting to bribe a cop is a really bad idea.
“It is not length of life, but depth of life.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am the last person in the family, perhaps on earth, who remembers our older cousin, Jack Whitehead. His magnificent oil portrait, painted in Vienna, 1948, hangs in our dining room. Jack operated as a military intelligence officer after WWII, helping important military and government operatives with knowledge of Stalin’s ambitions escape from Soviet bloc countries. He was friends with Texas’ great authors and philosophers, as well as several US diplomats. He took my son and me in when, as a single mother, rent became impossible. I worked with him cataloging a collection of J. Frank Dobe materials he planned to donate to Southwestern University. Remarkably brave, incredibly sweet and tender, I cannot believe no one is eager to see his papers regarding the radio station he ran in his Vienna attic exposing Soviet plans. It was a precursor to Radio Free Europe. When I die, perhaps my son will have some memory. Not much, but some.
Love wildly. Do outrageous things. Keep journals. Perhaps you will be a breeze across the face of some future generation.
Oh Jim, you will be remembered for all of the work you’ve done the lives you’ve touched and the books you have written. I appreciate your work. Thank you