The Measure of a Life

By Roger Rosenblatt

If people mean anything at all by the cant expression "untimely death," they must believe that some deaths run on a better schedule than others. Death in old age is rarely called untimely--a long life is thought to be a full one. But with the passing of a young person, one assumes that the best years lay ahead and the measure of that life was still to be taken.

History denies this, of course. Among prominent summer deaths, one recalls those of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, whose lives seemed equally brief and complete. Writers cannot bear the fact that poet John Keats died at 26, and only half playfully judge their own lives as failures when they pass that year. The idea that the life cut short is unfulfilled is illogical because lives are measured by the impressions they leave on the world and by their intensity and virtue. What one learns of the man suggests that John F. Kennedy Jr. led a very good life indeed, and if one calls his death untimely, it means only that one wished for more.

Time and value, in fact, have little to do with each other; the good die young, old and in between. It took Lincoln considerably less time to write the Gettysburg Address than it did for the Chinese to build their Great Wall, but given the choice, I for one would take the speech. Kennedy accomplished a number of quite valuable things in his life--specifically in programs for the disabled that helped the helpers of the disabled extend their education. The ripple effect of that sort of public service widens forever.

In some way, a life ended in youth may be superior to a prolonged existence subject to revisionism and conspicuous error. Death turns "potential" into realization; what one could have done becomes in effect what one did. If the outpouring of sorrow at Kennedy's death were driven by his family name, by his boyish, bouncy manner with the public, or by his good looks alone, one might be reasonably churlish in putting it down to counterfeit emotion. But the more one learns of his works, the things he accomplished with his time and money--the practical good sense of them; the gracious, modest style that attended them--the more one appreciates that this was a life worth mourning. Those who feel that journalism's coverage of his death has been overdone do not understand that there is a news of feeling as well as fact; and the feeling for Kennedy has come from fact.

Shortly before he died of lymphoma, the great writer and physician Lewis Thomas, whose books turned science into a way of appreciating the grandeur of the world, told me he thought the true measure of a life was that it be useful. He wondered in those last days if his own life had been useful, and many thousands of readers assured him that it had. Lewis died at 80, but he was fairly young when he did the bulk of his most useful work. "Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be," cried Robert Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra. Not always. Poetry replies to Rabbi Ben with A.E. Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young" and comes up with no more startling a conclusion than that a life is what one makes of it.

Celebrity is hardly a prerequisite. Kennedy's life would have been just as valuable had he been, to use another poet's phrase, a "mute, inglorious Milton." A beloved colleague at TIME died recently who was unknown to most of the world, save the friends she cherished, yet gestures of friendship were her public service. The measure of a life is often taken in the smallest units. On television, a parking attendant in the garage that Kennedy used mentioned that Kennedy came over personally to wish the man a merry Christmas every year. A middle-age African-American woman with whom he worked in one of the programs he supported was in tears at the recollection of continuous small acts of kindness. The sudden garden that has developed on the front steps of Kennedy's loft building began simply with neighbors paying homage to a neighbor. From such fragments of evidence a whole life is constructed, or reconstructed. The pity for the rest of us is that sometimes one learns of the measure of a life only because it is over.

When a man dies, a civilization dies with him. Whatever constituted his being--his gait, manners, tone of voice, political opinions, appearance, his particular use of language, philosophy, sense of beauty, sense of style, his personal history, ambitions, his smile--all go. Everything dies but the reverberation of his works in the lives of others; and so, while an individual civilization dies, the greater one profits. We call such deaths tragedies because the force of the life has been of great magnitude; yet tragedy from the point of view of the audience is high art, and one is filled with as much admiration as grief.

Keats chose as his epitaph "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." He believed that his life would be viewed as without consequence, and that he would be but one more transitory figure among the yearning and striving masses. Kennedy, too, I think, would have had his name writ in water, thus the appropriateness of his sea burial, because the best public servants disappear into the world, whose pain they feel. Every name is writ in water, which flows through us all.