Visitations

I'm currently reading a book by Marion Winik titled The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, and so far it's more fun than it might sound. Admittedly, it's about scores of people the author once knew who are no longer with us. But it's by no means gloomy. In fact, I was struck at how its mood differed from an impression I'd gotten in my childhood reading. Like most kids in history, I was given books to instruct and uplift, books about individuals who struggled to achieve great things. Usually the books would dwell on the period of work and crisis and final achievement and then gallop through the rest of the individual's life. Often this was an oddly rushed, uncomfortable denouement, as if the biographers were quietly embarrassed at what came next. Family tragedy, sickness, decay, neglect—the triumphant phase of life would often devolve into a sad collapse, it seemed. I didn't find it chilling, exactly—I was a child, after all—but it was like a sudden cold breeze on an otherwise warm autumn afternoon, a hint of things to come.

But Wink's book isn't about famous people whose lives necessarily faded; it's about everday people with only two shared characteristics: She knew them, and they're dead. The sketches I've read so far have been sometimes poignant but more just matter-of-fact, affectionate, clear-eyed memories of people in the round. In an author's note, Winik says the writing process "never seemed morbid or depressing to me. ... Writing this book has been a chance to hang out with my friends." It's signed "Marion Winik, Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, February 2008," because Glen Rock, of course, is where the author lives.

My copy was sent to me by a mutual friend of Winik's and mine, and when I started reading it, I saw Winik had inscribed it with my name and the phrase, "To life!" Many people will recognize this as a translation of a Jewish toast, L'chaim. But it's also a little hint about the book's subject. When I was reading those biographies years ago, I lived the most vivid parts of the subjects' lives with them, and then watched in dismay as their decay happened in a shocking rush. But the characters in Glen Rock are people I never would have heard of, never became attached or sympathetic to from afar or at all, and the fact of their death is a precondition to our meeting. Winik presents them as miniatures, and their decay or sudden end seem somehow not to matter: they have death in common, so what distinguishes them, what sets them apart from each other, is their life. And that's what stands out. They're in their graves, yes, but also tenderly preserved in a charming little snow globe of memory and art.

As it happens, I saw a local theater group do an adaptation of A Christmas Carol this weekend. And now that I think about it, the Dickens story also acknowledges death without being in the least morbid or lugubrious. So there you are. Memento mori, right? And carpe diem. And while we're on the subject, l'chaim.