WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE

Oct 03, 2011 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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Dorothy Parker was famous for her sense of humour and acerbic wit.  US President, Calvin Coolidge, was taciturn to the extreme.  Coolidge’s attitude so rankled Alice Roosevelt Longworth (daughter of former President Theodore Roosevelt) that she described Coolidge as looking “as if he had been weaned on a pickle.”  Coolidge’s reticence was legendary.
For example, when Coolidge returned from church one Sunday morning he was asked by his father on what topic the Minister had preached.  After thinking for a moment, Coolidge replied, “Sin.”  “And what did he say about sin?” was the next question.  Again, Coolidge thought for a moment and then responded, “He was against it.”
Another example took place at a high-society dinner table where the lady sitting next to Coolidge tried her best to coax him into talking to her.  She gushed, “I have made a bet, Mr. Coolidge, that I could get more than two words out of you.”  Coolidge replied sharply, “You lose.”  So, when someone came up to Ms. Parker and blurted out that Coolidge was dead, she quipped, “How can they tell?”
I have been having problems along the same line myself.  It seems that several different organisations with which I deal are not certain that I am still alive and keep sending me documents to sign to prove that I presently exist.  I have often joked to my friends that at my age it is not judicious to buy green avocadoes since I am not sure I will be around long enough for them to ripen.
The problem is that having seen, over the past few years, the demise from a variety of age-related illnesses of all my peers, to go without my pears would be the crowning irony.
I also joke that I have got so old that when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is reach for the newspapers and go straight to the obituary page.  If my name is not in it, I get up.  Clearly this is an exaggeration but as anyone who played contact sports in his youth will tell you, every knock you got when you were in your youth has a double effect – you feel it when it happens and you feel it again and again as you age.  It is the ‘pound’
of flesh that you pay for when you wake up and cannot get up.
This is why pensioners and expatriates like me have to pay more than twice for reaching that point in life where the agencies which have money for you want to be sure you’re alive before they pay.  I live in Antigua and cannot drop into the respective offices and say, “Here is your proof.”  I have to fill in a form or two and in one particular case I had to get a statement that I am still alive notarised.
Because I know someone at the top level in another organisation, I have to call him, send an email that he could then take to his people, and only then is it accepted that I am still alive and, if still kicking, have so far avoided the bucket and any pail horses.
My wife, who as a journalist tends to be intolerant of bureaucracy and officiousness, finds the whole scenario, played out at frequent intervals, both incredible and incomprehensible.  She points out that my newspaper columns in Trinidad appear twice a week so that the authorities will know if anything happens to me between Wednesday (when my ‘Funny Business’ column appears in the Business Supplement of the Trinidad Express) and Saturday when my column appears in several regional media including the Express.
She also believes that I am well known enough in Trinidad that my death would be reported even if only in the comic strip.  My own humorous view is that a single stipulation in my will would definitely guarantee that enough people would know about my death and would be interested in the immediate aftermath.
My last request is to be buried at sea and I am asking the Cabinet of Trinidad and Tobago (TNT) to be my pallbearers.  A lot of people to whom I have jokingly said this are not convinced that it is a joke.  They believe that given what the TNT government has been able to get away with, this would be mere child’s play for them.  My friends suggest that as a cricket fan, I should think about cremation – in other words, play for the ashes.
Even though I carp about it, the bureaucracy is important – after all, someone else could be writing my columns or recycling them from the 1990s when they started in the Barbados Nation.  After about 20 years and 1000 columns, few people would be able to differentiate between the repeats and the three-peats.
What might be worse than having to prove that I am alive, is to be declared dead without going through the entire process, so to speak.  WIKIPEDIA has a list of what it calls ‘premature obituaries’ and identifies the more common causes like ‘accidental publication’ (when a newspaper or website jumps the gun and reports the fact before it happens), a hoax (when someone else reports untruthfully that you’re dead), and ‘pseudocide’ or when you fake your own death to evade legal, financial and even marital problems.
In the case of people who were still alive when their deaths were announced, WIKIPEDIA gives two interesting examples, “Arms manufacturer, Alfred Nobel, whose premature obituary condemning him as a ‘merchant of death’ may have caused him to create the Nobel Prize” and “black nationalist Marcus Garvey, whose actual death was apparently caused by reading his own obituary.”
I suppose if that happens to me, I might freak out, but not as much as the man whose wife had died and as they were leaving the church the coffin fell and the woman came out of her coma and lived for another year before she died again.  This time, as they were leaving the church the grieving husband with tearful eyes looked at the pallbearers and shouted, “Careful!”
*Tony Deyal was last seen saying that old journalists never die, they just get de-pressed.

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