![]() “Maybe write a book about our friendship.” “We’ve laughed so hard,” he said to me some years ago. ![]() I’m not who I would have been without him. We spent thousands of hours in each other’s company. It was as plotless as friendship ought to be. It was not like a marriage, still less like a love affair. There was no dramatic arc to our life together. To talk daily with someone of such gifts had been a salvation. A phrase from The Human Stain came to me: “the dignity of an elderly gentleman free from desire who behaves correctly.” I wanted to tell him that he was doing fine, that he was a champ at being dead, bringing to it all the professionalism he’d brought to previous tasks. I pulled up a chair and managed to say, “Here we are.” Here we are at the promised end. But do not touch him.” Duly draped, Philip looked serene on his plinth-like a Roman emperor, one of the good ones. An undertaker pointed the way to the viewing room and said, “You may stay for as long as you like. I was obliged to reidentify the body once we arrived there from New York–Presbyterian Hospital. But it was Riverside Memorial Chapel, the Jewish funeral parlor at Amsterdam and 76th, that we were bound for. ET on April 26, 2020.ĭ elirious near the end, he said, “We’re going to the Savoy!”-surely the jauntiest dying words on record. ![]()
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