I’ve been to a couple funerals lately. Last month, we buried my maternal
grandfather. Back on Christmas Day, my family convened at my Mom and stepdad’s condo
for Christmas dinner; and although weak and a bit confused as usual, Gramps seemed
none the worse for wear. He engaged in his normal schtick, looking at his watch
every few minutes and asking when the cab was arriving to take him back to
Kingsway, his retirement home. Several times he pointed at the front door and
said, Is that the door I leave out of? In retrospect, this particular action of
his is sad and a bit chilling.
The next day, Boxing Day, he went into hospital and never came out,
gradually declining over the next three-plus weeks until he dropped right off
the cliff. While I was riding the bus one morning on my way to work, my Mom
called me and said she’d gotten the phone call from the hospital. I held it
together until exiting the bus. There was no memorial or fancy funeral festivities
or any big to-do in committing his body to the cold, always-hungry ground. It was
just my Mom and her husband, my two sisters, Praveena and I at the cemetery. Gramps
was a no-frills kind of guy when it came to certain things, such as funerals. He'd requested the same for his wife when she died four years ago. He himself preferred
the pine-box treatment. I did a brief eulogy.
Gramps believed there were two kinds of people in the world: chaps and
characters. If you were a nice, hard-working, stand-up person, you were a chap.
If you were sketchy, shady or downright devious, you were a character. He was mostly
a chap, but an opinionated one, and racist in the way white people in their
late eighties tend to be. But he was my Gramps and he helped shape me into the
man I am today, and I will always love him. In the days following his death, several
times over I wondered if I’d done enough to make him proud, each time concluding
that I could’ve made him prouder.
Last weekend, I attended the funeral of my best friend’s father, who also
had been sick over the holidays and, while hospitalized in ICU, suddenly passed
early one morning. Despite the proximal connection to my Gramps’ simple service,
this one was vastly different in tone and pomp.
My buddy’s dad was a hot-shot lawyer whose memorial was held in the
Church of the Redeemer at Bloor and Avenue and attended by hundreds. At one
point, Praveena nudged me, pointed at someone in the crowd and whispered, Is
that Eddie Greenspan? Two ministers presided over the seventy-minute ceremony
and four people gave eulogies. Hymns were sung, engaging sermons were delivered,
even a benediction of sorts was said. And afterward a reception was held at the
Hyatt across the street, complete with hors d’oeuvres, coat check and a slide show of life
highlights.
At both events, I got to thinking, probably in the same way everyone touched
by death and the subsequent funeral gets to thinking. No matter how suddenly a
person with connections in this world dies, or how his or her life is
commemorated, certain realities remain constant: people are saddened, with some
getting emotional and others remaining stoic; people are reminded of their own
mortality and that of those nearest and dearest; and, ultimately, people wonder
if they are living their life properly. They ask themselves questions like: What
can I be doing better? Should I be doing this instead of that? Am I a failure? How
much time do I have to fix my mistakes? Is it too late to be the best at
whatever I want to do? Am I a chap or a character?
What came first, language or self-doubt? Perhaps the latter inspired the
former. (Interesting topic for future research.) Anyway, we’ve been
experiencing self-doubt probably since we were grunty little Australopithecines
learning to walk on two legs, maybe even earlier. Too much self-doubt can be as
crippling as too little, but just enough is, well, just enough. The most successful
people often use self-doubt to fuel the impulse to improve themselves, to be
the best they can be, which sometimes ends up being the best in their field.
Based on the evidence of his funeral service, my best friend’s dad was
quite the chap—one who achieved seriously important things during a life he
obviously lived on his own terms. Even so, he likely experienced his share of
self-doubt. Yet his numerous successes, revealed by eulogistic testimony, sparked
me to ask myself all of the above questions, and inevitably compare my own life
to his. When all is said and done, I wondered, will I have emotionally touched
as many people as filled the Church of the Redeemer? It’s a pride thing, certainly,
but also a practical thing, a means of making me feel better about my accomplishments, of reducing self-doubt.
My Gramps, on the other hand, while perhaps not as commercially or
socially successful—as evidenced by his simple burial ceremony attended only by
immediate family—nonetheless forged a comfortable, even noble existence. He devoted
himself to hard work and built with his own two hands the dwelling he and his
wife called home. To a family he put before everything else—sometimes selfishly
so—he brought love and joy and life lessons. He lived on his own terms, and in the
end, he died a satisfied man.
Whether chap or character, what one does with one’s own life—and how one
measures success—differs from person to person. This is as axiomatic as the urge
to lend emotional support to grieving family and friends, as the human tendency
toward self-doubt, as death. The more we understand these differences, the less
inclined we will be to compare our own lives to those of others. And the more we’ll
be able to maintain an optimal, or goldilocks, level of self-doubt—just enough
to fuel our desire to improve.
