Robert Warshow
AN OLD MAN GONE
I must confess we come not to be kings :
That's not our fault.
-THE JEW OF MALTA
In
.a
will made some years before he died, my father
directed that his body was to be cremated and that there was to be
no religious ceremonial of any kind at his funeral. A later will,
drawn up during his final illness, did not mention these points; I
suppose the imminent possibility of death may have made him
reluctant to go into details.
(It
was said later that he "must have
known" he was dying; it is true that he made no direct reference to
death during the fifteen months of his illness, except once at the
very beginning and again a few hours before he died.) In any
case, it was readily decided to carry out the instructions of the
earlier will in this respect. Any other course would have been the
grossest absurdity, ,and no other course was suggested or, I would
guess, even thought of. He had expressed a point of view that we all
shared.
It is interesting that the will made no provision about the dis–
position of his ashes, often the one point on which the freethinker
allows himself to betray something approaching a religious senti–
ment. Once or twice when my father had talked about his wish
to be cremated-he talked about it rather often, indeed, with heavy
and, to me, disturbing humor-I had asked
him,
in much the same
tone, what was to be done with his ashes. He didn't care, he said–
do anything, throw them into an ash can. When at last the problem
really came up, I suggested that the ashes might
be
buried under a
tree at the summer hotel he had built in the Catskills. This idea was
greeted favorably (my mother recalled that she had "always told
him," as he continued to invest money in that unprofitable enterprise,
that he w,as building a mausoleum for himself ), and I was secretly
pleased when someone else in the family proposed that we might even
put some kind of plaque on the tree.
As
it
turned out, however, one
