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efficient, psychologically correct, to do what we’d been doing all along. The track record was pretty good on this. We’d been doing—the species, not the undertakers—more or less the same thing for millennia: looking up while digging down, trying to make some sense of all of it, disposing of our dead with sufficient pauseto say they’d lived in ways different from rocks and rhododendrons and even orangutans and that those lives were worth mentioning and remembering.
    Then Kennedy was shot dead and then Lee Harvey Oswald and we spent the end of November that year burying them—the first deaths in our lives that took for most of us boomers. All the other TV types got shot on Gunsmoke on a Friday and turned up on Bonanza , looking fit by Sunday night. But Kennedy was one of those realities of death my father must have been talking about and though we saw his casket and cortege and little John John saluting and the widow in her sunglasses, we never saw Kennedy dead, most of us, until years later when pictures of the autopsy were released and we all went off to the movies to see what really happened. In theinterim, rumors circulated about Kennedy not being dead at all but hooked to some secret and expensive hardware, brainless but breathing. And when the Zapruder film convinced us that he must have died, still we lionized the man beyond belief. Of course, once we saw him dead in the pictures, his face, his body, he became human again: lovable and imperfect, memorable and dead.
    A nd as I watchmy generation labor to give their teenagers and young adults some “family values” between courses of pizza and Big Macs, I think maybe Gladstone had it right. I think my father did. They understood that the meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death; that mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions—only those who do it well andthose who don’t. And if death is regarded as an embarrassment or an inconvenience, if the dead are regarded as a nuisance from whom we seek a hurried riddance, then life and the living are in for like treatment. McFunerals, McFamilies, McMarriage, McValues. This is the mathematical precision the old Britisher was talking about and what my father was talking about when he said we’d know what to do.
    Thus tending to his death, his dead body, had for me the same importance as being present for the births of my sons, my daughter. Some expert on Oprah might call this “healing.” Another on Donahue might say “cathartic.” Over on Geraldo it might have “scarred him for life.” And Sally Jesse Whatshername might mention “making good choices.” As if they were talking about men who cut umbilical cordsand change diapers or women who confront their self-esteem issues or their date rapists.
    It is not about choices or functions or psychological correctness. A dead body has had its options limited, its choices narrowed. It is an old thing in the teeth of which we do what has been done because it is the thing to do. We needn’t reinvent the wheel or make the case for it, though my generation alwaysseems determined to.
    And they are at it over on the other island. Trying to reinvent the funeral as “a vehicle for the healthy expression of grief,” which, of course, it is; or as “a brief therapy for the acutely bereaved,” which, of course, it is. There will be talk of “stages,” “steps,” “recovery.” Someone will mention “aftercare,” “post-funeral service follow-up,” Widow to Widow programs,Mourners Anonymous? And in the afternoons they’ll play nine holes, or go snorkeling or start cocktails too early and after dinner they’ll go dancing then call home to check in with their offices just before they go to bed, to check on the gross sales, to see who among their townspeople has died.
    Maybe I’ll take the boat over tomorrow. Maybe some of the old timers are there—men of my father’sgeneration, men you