The Mast-Head: Of Birth and Death

Of all the unlikely places, it was at a wake this week that I found myself talking about births and the fact that this newspaper publishes many fewer notices of them than it used to.

The wake was for Ed Hannibal, whom a crowd and then some was there to mourn and remember, and I ended up chatting in the back of the room with Eileen Myles, a poet I had long admired and who was Ed’s stepsister, something I had known at one time but nearly forgot.

Eileen asked how the paper was doing and said it was important for members of a community, any community, to feel connected to one another. I agreed. Then it dawned on me as I was speaking that people these days seem to do so much of their connecting on Facebook and on other online sites that perhaps the now-rare announcements of births in print have also taken to the web. Weddings and engagements, though we welcome them, have dwindled somewhat, too.

At the other end of life’s arc, obituaries carry on at much the same rate as they always have. Finality still requires hard copy, or so it would appear.

At Ed’s funeral on Monday at East Hampton’s Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church, his son Jack talked about something his father had always said to his kids while dropping them off at school or somewhere. “Remember who you are and what you stand for,” Ed would say — a bit of heavyweight existentialism to drop on a third-grader, Jack said.

It had been a while since I had been at a Mass, though we mention them nearly every week on the obituary page. And though I am not the churchgoing type, it was impossible not to feel like I was part of something bigger just by being there.

At that moment in the service when the priest asked us to turn to those nearby and offer them a word of peace, Horty Carpentier, whom I’ve known for many years, reached over the pews and offered me her hands. “You could use some peace,” she said. “We all could,” I said, half to myself.

“Remember who you are and what you stand for,” Ed said, and fine advice it is.