At last he understood that all his life had been choreography for his funeral. He came to this not 
through therapy, but during a walk in the woods on his friend Bernstein’s sheep farm in southern 
Oregon.

	It was January, he’d been invited to spend the week, and early Monday before the others 
were up he went walking in the cold, the maples still holding brilliant leaves on their lowest 
branches, his boots crunching ice along the path. He stopped at the pond, broke off a pane of ice 
from its surface, held it up, saw his own crazed reflection there, an abstraction he was proud to 
appreciate, and he wanted to tell Bernstein about it, Bernstein a painter, tell him about the 
fascinating distortion, the outline of the nose limning a raised ridge in the ice, the chin line 
carved along the edge—he wanted his friend to know that he understood abstraction. And when 
he came back into the house, went into his paneled room overlooking the sheep pen, took off his 
jacket and gloves and rehearsed his quick speech about the glassy ice, he knew then, in the quiet 
of the house, that the entire speech was meant to plant in Bernstein’s head the possibility, the 
suggestion, of his painter friend rising at his funeral and saying, “I just want to say that he 
understood abstraction.”

	He sat on the bed, and in a moment less of honesty than of a long life’s filtration, saw that 
almost everything he had said or done in his life after, say, age thirty, had been funeral 
choreography.

	For decades now, he admitted, he’d pictured the exact room of his memorial: warm 
yellow light, metal chairs, a bank of windows revealing a mature garden, wine and hors 
d’oeuvres on a table at the rear, a crowd larger than the capacity of the place. A winter afternoon
—perhaps not unlike what today’s afternoon will be, he thought.

	How familiar he was with that place. It had been his, detail after detail added, for thirty 
years now—was always there when he spoke, didn’t speak, acted, didn’t act.

	When he was a lover, he was a lover in order that the beautiful woman he was caressing 
might, at that memorial, stand—only at the end, mind you—and in a soft voice say I just wanted 
to mention that he was a wonderful lover, and then ten women, emboldened, would stand and in 
a quickly accelerating crescendo say He certainly was, and it would be a moment of great humor,
 memorable.

	When he took time to speak with the postman who brought his mail and he asked after 
the postman’s kids, it was in hope, really, that the postman would rise that same day and say, He 
always asked about my family, always remembered my kids’ names.

	When he was a teacher, he taught not so much to share knowledge but to assemble a 
legion of potential memorial-goers, each of them standing to say He taught me so much, and He 
was so important to me formatively, and The world will never be the same . . .

	And so it went: when he visited the sick, helped a neighbor change a transmission, 
bought season tickets to the symphony, studied the Ramayana, traveled to difficult places—all 
was toward memorial accolade: He brought tenderness to everything he did. He’d give you the 
shirt off his back. He was an underground scholar. He knew more about John Cage than most 
musicians I know. He could name the streets of Nairobi in his sleep, and of course, his friend 
Bernstein’s abstraction comment, and his good wife positioned at the side of the room 
surrounded north, south, east, west by his four kids, all of them laughing and weeping.

	He couldn’t know, though, on this clear winter day in southern Oregon, that his memorial 
would be nothing like that. 

	His wife would have arranged a simple service in the Presbyterian Church, word of his 
death would not have gone out widely—one of his sons having missed the deadline for the 
obituary—and there was a storm: brutal rain, dangerous driving. Family and extended family 
would come, but Bernstein would be in Hawaii, the postman long dead, students spread around 
the globe, most of them hearing of his death only months later, and no lovers: not one. Why 
would they have heard? A neighbor would rise to say He helped me change my transmission, and 
I still have the scars to prove it, but the little joke would have gone over badly, sounding 
strangely bitter.

	But for this Monday morning, he was at peace with himself, the confidence of a 
choreographer just before opening night, certain that his dancers know their moves, that the stage 
is clean, the music cued, the lights just right, the understudies stretching in the wings.