The departed and things they said
Kathy Whitworth died last week. She was 83 and dropped dead at a holiday party, apparently a festive affair. It was said she was her usual self moments before she died: convivial, happy, looking ahead.
Whitworth was professional golf’s winningest player, with 88 tournament championships. Asked once how she wanted to be remembered, she answered, modestly, “If people remember me at all, it will be good enough.”
Whitworth’s little nugget seems a fitting place to start an admittedly modest catalogue of those souls who departed the scene in 2022. Those of us still living and breathing might benefit from what these now dead did or had to say about, well, living and breathing.
Angela Lansbury was nominated for an Academy Award at the age of 19 (for best supporting actress in the 1944 thriller “Gaslight”); she was still at it decades later, claiming a Broadway Tony at age 83 (for 2009’s “Blithe Spirit”).
She said, “I really don’t know how to relax to the degree I would just stop [working]. So when something comes along and is presented to me, and I think, ‘Gee, I could have some fun doing that’ or ‘I think I could bring something to that;’ I’ll do it.”
This sounds similar to David McCullough, the narrative historian. He noted that he had kept “the most interesting company possible” – John Adams, Teddy Roosevelt, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Washington Roebling, and Harry Truman, among them.
“The reward of the work,” McCullough said, “has always been the work itself.” He added, “The days are never long enough.”
Barbara Ehrenreich died in September at the age 81. A journalist, Ehrenreich was indefatigable.
According to her daughter, speaking to the New York Times, Ehrenreich was writing a book about the “evolution of narcissism” when she died.
An activist-writer, Ehrenreich began her long career in 1969, penning a book with her first husband, John Ehrenreich, about the anti-war student movement.
For her most famous book, “Nickel and Dimed,” about low wages and growing inequality in the richest country in the world, she took jobs as a short-order waitress, a cleaning and a laundry lady, a nurse’s aide, and a Wal-Mart associate, and later said, “Many people praised me for my bravery for having done this – to which I can only say: Millions of people do this kind of work every day for their entire lives. Don’t you notice?”
Ehrenreich believed that living profitably takes guts and perseverance.
Comedian Bob Saget, who died suddenly from a spill in his hotel room while on the road in 2022, said, “I love watching people get hit in the crotch. But only if they get back up.”
Acid-tongued comedian Gilbert Gottfried, who succumbed in April to muscular dystrophy, was a mild-mannered family man who doted on his children, and said about his choice of a profession, “Not only was I too stupid to do anything else, but I was too stupid to think of the odds against” succeeding.
Heavyset Louie Anderson, whose troubled past informed his comic sensibilities, also died in 2022. He killed during his first appearance on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson,” opening with, “I can’t stay long. I’m in between meals.”
“Between meals” as a definition of life is one many of us ascribe to or identify with.
Vince Dooley died. He was 90. He was the longtime former University of Georgia football coach. Of all things, Dooley was also a world-class horticulturist. What a strange combination – football and flowers! But that was Dooley, whose example makes the incompatible complimentary to a full, rounded life.
Roger Angell was called the “poet laureate” of baseball, as if baseball needs such a thing. The New Yorker veteran called himself a reporter, which, for me, says it all.
Angell, who was 101 when he died, once wrote that Willie Mays ran so fast that, magic-like, long fly balls seemed to “stop and wait for him.”
In life, as in writing, it’s useful sometimes to see things differently.
Movie director Peter Bogdanovich said, about early success, “You pretend to know more than you do.”
Actor James Caan said, “Passion is such an important thing to have in life because it ends so soon…”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.