A couple years ago, our family had the involuntary honor and unfortunate duty of composing an obituary for Dad, who had lived nearly 84 years. Most of us know that obituaries comprise the ultimate writing assignment: due immediately if not sooner alongside too many other last-minute tasks and decisions, all occurring during a time of high emotion, when the word “deadline” achieves the most literal brutality. Our kindly funeral director offered, of course, to carry out the task. Surely, though, Dad deserved better than a generic notice concocted by a well-meaning stranger.
So Mom, brother, sisters, and I put our heads and hands together to come up with a personalized tribute more befitting the man who gave his life for us. The first draft sounded reasonable, but hesitation struck when we grasped the truly public nature of the task. People might actually read this material, perhaps even some people unknown to us, leaving us neither available nor able to explain exactly what we meant by this or that expression. Does that attribute sound offensive? Will this phrase make us all sound weird? Facetious? Disrespectful? Does the overall tone fully convey Dad’s unique personality? Viewed from those perspectives, further clarification seemed in order for a few sentences, then a paragraph, then the whole essay. Kind of almost exactly like a blog post, except far more important and serious.
After missing deadline number one, the light of the next afternoon helped us recognize that the essay was about Dad, not about us. If a few readers graded the effort, we’d accept the occasional F to avoid Incompletion humiliation. Plus, we had run completely out of time, so we fell back on the original funeral committee compromise, which urged mourners to honor Dad’s memory, in part, by reading the comics rather than the obituaries. Most every reader agreed that Dad would have favored that option. A few offered the highest possible praise: “That story sounds just like something your Dad would have written!”
I had skated by, obituary-wise, on Dad’s shoulders by contributing one of his many oft-recited quotes: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”—philosopher George Santayana (Jorge de Santayana y Borrás). Just like in high school: quota by quotation. Sad mission successfully accomplished. Or so I thought until last week, over two years after the fact.
Perusing one of many on-line columns regarding what to do about my crumbling physical, mental, and financial health, I came across a quote from Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke: “If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.”
Fantastic advice! Floating around out there for the last 250 years, and I had missed it by a couple centuries and a thousand nautical miles! I immediately wanted more guidance from the wise Mr. Burke. The internet granted my wish with a short biography and a list of additional quotes, one of which said, to my horror: “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it,” a phrase very similar to the quotation I had attributed to Santayana in Dad’s obituary. A frantic lifespan check confirmed that Burke had lived decades earlier than Santayana, making him the potential quote originator.
A common scene from my unruly, disobedient, rebellious youth leapt immediately to mind: the penalty phase, during which Dad would fix me with a withering gaze, gesture my way with an open palm, and look toward Mom and then heavenward while intoning with great sorrow: “This is our purpose.” His humble manner of taking the blame for my transgressions while urging a step toward maturity.
Half a century later and two years gone, his purpose had yet to gain any traction. I pictured Dad kneeling before his savior, shaking his head in continued sorrow while apologizing yet again for unleashing me and my lazy misattributions upon the world. After all the money he had spent on the Encyclopedia Britannica and the time he had taken to encourage me to “Look it up!” I had failed to progress, devolving instead from borderline plagiarism to outright ignorance, exacerbating the offense by memorializing a misquote beneath his name, in print as well as on-line.
Hope arose when I spotted a “False quotations” subheading in Edmund Burke’s Wikipedia entry. That optimism quickly dissolved, however, into a debate over the origin of, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” I didn’t care who said that, disillusioned as I had suddenly become by the whole concept of citations. I did waste a moment, though, to concoct a counter version in support of my resolution never to quote again: “The only thing necessary for the defeat of evil is for bad men to do nothing.”
Unable to obey my own manufactured affirmation, I continued the quest to prove myself right before the eyes of long-gone long-suffering Dad, only to discover yet another reference to condemned history repeats within the fifteen million published and carefully examined words of Winston Churchill. Further inspection revealed, fortunately, that the quote in question had, in fact, first appeared in Santayana’s 1905 work, The Life of Reason, which, based on titular evidence, outlines an existence quite the opposite of mine, tentatively called The Search for No Conclusion.
Emboldened by the single reference in my favor, I studied the works of Edmund Burke more closely, eventually discovering an excerpt from his 1790 pamphlet, Reflections on the Revolution in France: “People will not look forward to posterity,* who never look backward to their ancestors.” According to wikiquote.org, this statement “often leads to misattribution,” a vague declaration implying Santayana as the originator but ultimately failing at specific identification.
*all future generations (I had to look it up, distracted as I was by the similarity of this word to “posterior,” which always makes me giggle)
Additional “research” revealed a number of variations on the subject quote from both Burke and Santayana and went on long enough to prove that I had never actually developed the big-picture focus most adults possess. I had obviously taken Dad’s frequent “Look it up!” guidance far too literally, misidentifying his requests for peace as educational lessons for me. Now that I consider those encounters more carefully, he never requested that I report my research back to him, which I often did anyway, aloud, to the tune of soft snores.
I missed the point back then, as I continue to miss it today, almost as much as I miss good old Dad. May he finally rest in peace now that I have finally begun trying to listen to him, as I will attempt to listen to you, and your advice in the form provided below. Thanks in advance.