Several of my friends are facing their final days. I visit each, often. One of them speaks blithely about his approaching demise. I play along.
So have you prepared your final words yet?
No. I don’t think that far ahead, he said.
Fair enough.
(I, however, have given it some thought.)
Oscar Wilde said: My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.
Emily Dickinson: I must go in; the fog is rising.
Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson: Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.
Joan Crawford: Don’t you dare ask God to help me.
Steve Jobs: Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.
I once visited a dear friend on his deathbed. Ethan was too young to be dying, but he was. Just days to go.
How ya doin’, my friend?
Other than dying, he said, I’m not doing too bad.
Sorry. I wish it weren’t so.
Yeah. Me too. But let me tell you, pal, dying is easy; comedy is hard.
(Allegedly, those were the final words of Edmund Kean, a Shakespearean actor. I didn’t know that. I looked it up.)
Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.
My friend knew a thing or two about comedy. Ethan and I wrote comedy for the Rumsey Radio Hour for nearly 10 years. I wrote comic sketches. He wrote comic detective plays—“Johnny Dime, the Poet of Crime”—as good as anything on A Prairie Home Companion.
That was a lot of fun. But, yes, it was also hard work. We played to a sophisticated audience in Reynolds Hall on the campus of Shepherd University and over 12 radio stations. It aired monthly.
Radio shows, like all shows, have deadlines for scripts. The first, the second, the FINAL. Ethan ignored them all. He’d still be scribbling when the curtain went up.
He drove me crazy.
But I loved him. And I miss him. We had fun. We worked hard, but it was worth it. We made people laugh.
I don’t remember Ethan’s actual final words, but for me they’ll always be:
Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.
Today is the Fourth Sunday in Advent. The fourth candle stands for LOVE.
Live well. Laugh often. Love much.
Those are the final words of this final post of the year.
