Art Buchwald—The Last Word

The New York Times’ excellent Video section posted a series of four beautiful, tremendously moving and—believe it or not—uplifting interviews with Art Buchwald after his Death on Thursday 1-18.

Located at the bottom of all New York Times channels (column on your left), click on Art Buchwald and he'll be opening with the words “Hi, I’m Art Buchwald and I just died”, the Pulitzer Prize winning satirist and columnist recounts the start of his career at the Herald Tribune in Paris and a life spent amongst the powerful, famous and extremely talented.

The interview never loses sight of Buchwald’s recent months spent inside a Washington hospice after he was diagnosed with kidney failure. In a very public move the writer had decided not to undergo dialysis but instead to simply die.

Given a maximum of two to three weeks to live by his doctors, the columnist wasted no time and embarked on saying his goodbyes to a never ending stream of friends, colleagues and political and showbiz figures who made the trek to his bedside.

“I became some sort of celebrity for death. […] When people came to the hospice, they didn’t realize, they came in, they were very nervous to see someone who was dying. And they couldn’t believe it because I was up, I was laughing, telling stories, jokes and they went away happy”.

To everyone’s surprise, his body kept his kidneys working and after several months of holding court at the hospice Buchwald was released to his summer home, which in his own words meant having to scrap "all the plans for my funeral" and "start worrying about Bush again." He continued to write his column, even finishing "Too Soon to Say Goodbye", a book on his experiences at the hospice that was published in November.

“The most important thing about a hospice, it is the most important thing about the whole thing—people are afraid of death and they are afraid of talking about death. And they don’t know what to do about it”.

Comments

[deaf scgiik]

all the plans for my funeral" and "start worrying about Bush again.