I See You've Called in Dead Quotes

“It’s a needed reminder of who you are, of what truly matters. Because it’s your life and there’s still time to write it.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“She held up her hand as if she had been badly scalded and said that my attempt to mansplain in the context of my white, cisgender privilege was repugnant to her and that she frankly wasn’t sure that even an immediate apology would erase the trauma my words had caused but that if I wrote an essay asking for forgiveness for my tone-deafness to the LGBTQ community as well as people of color, minorities, and the non-able-bodied, that might be a start.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“Maybe we’re all obituary writers. And our job is to write the best story we can now.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“There are three secrets to a happy life. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“The world changed,” Howard said to his glass. “Broke in a way. I see things, read things, watch things, and I think … I don’t understand that. The inanity, the vulgarity, the cruelty.” He turned to look at me. “Is it just me, getting older?” “I think something has changed.” “Something fundamental, perhaps. And so we retreat. Sure, we do our jobs, provide for our families. But then we seek cover. I subscribe to a channel on YouTube called Relaxing Mowing. It’s speeded-up footage of people mowing their lawns, trimming their hedges. The world made clean and perfect. They put classical music over it. If someone described that to me five years ago, I would say that person was insane. Now, I love it. I watch these in bed at night. I watch videos of Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse dancing. The elegance and grace. Where has that gone? Now we have twerking.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“He’s a … he’s a dear friend,” I continued, “who I’ve never told how much I love. And when I first started my job with him and his annoying office habits, he said to me, he said, ‘The good news is that someone died today.’ I thought he was joking. He later explained that this thing we do, the writing of these things, the celebration of someone’s life, it’s a gift, a reminder. What death dares us to do, is celebrate it. To celebrate the gift of life in its fleeting face.” I looked down at my speech, at the last line, and smiled. I took the pages, folded them in half, and put them in my jacket pocket. “Here we are, as Tim would have said, all of us, on this lovely day, alive. What are we going to do with that?”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“So what now? After we all leave this church, leave the reception, go home, put in laundry, watch a show on Netflix, go to bed, get up tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow. This has to mean something. Something lasting. I mean, why do we do this thing, wakes and funerals? A sign of respect, of course, for the dead. A sign of respect for the family. But I wonder if it’s also for all of us. Each of us here. Surely it’s a reminder. But perhaps also a call to a state of grace, if only for a few moments. A pause to remember how fleeting our own mortality is. I had an office mate.” I was tempted to look at Tuan but couldn’t quite do it.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“There are 161 songs about New York City, more than any other city in the world. There is a reason for that. Despite the noise and the outrageous cost, the crowds and truly repulsive smells, it is unlike anywhere else. To move there, even at my advanced age of thirty-eight, was to be reborn, revitalized. If human beings are energy, what are eight million of us in those five boroughs?”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“forget so many details of our life. Weeks and months where events, moments, banal and meaningful, blur and then dissipate. And then there are the snippets that live on, forever sharp and alive, always there, waiting to be replayed. I”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“see a red cardinal from time to time, out the back window, on the old ash tree, occasionally hopping onto the back deck. They are hard not to notice. Their color, their particular beauty. I did a search online and came across an interesting story. Apparently red cardinals can be spiritual messengers. The word cardinal comes from the Latin word cardo, meaning hinge or axis. Like a door’s hinge, the cardinal is a kind of doorway between Earth and the spirit world, the story said. There are, depending upon how late you are willing to stay up and how much you want to read and how much you miss your friend, many myths around the cardinal having to do with renewal and good health. They are, say some, a visit from the other side.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“character in the book is asked what the greatest wonder in the world is. And he answers … He says, The greatest wonder is that every day, all around us, people die, but we act as if it couldn’t happen to us. And yet … living is hard. What’s the point? Why are we even here? How can we know all this … stuff about how to live, about how there is literally a one-in-four-hundred-trillion chance of ever being born and yet, in the next moment, when some jackass cuts me off on the Belt Parkway and then gives”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“When I read the news, no,” she said. “When I see small children, yes. When I listen to talk radio, no. When I fly on a plane, yes. When I take Amtrak and go through North Philadelphia and see how people have to live, no. When I sit in my kitchen in the winter with coffee and watch the sunrise, yes. When I volunteered at Memorial Sloan Kettering in the children’s unit, no. When I see the parents who sleep next to their children for weeks at a time in that unit, yes. When I make the horrible mistake of glancing at the New York Post, no. When I see some tough-looking kid on the subway who I’ve mentally judged based on how he looks give his seat up for an elderly woman, yes.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“Seemingly small lives writ large—the ones that cause you to pause over your morning coffee, stopping midsentence in the kitchen, the smell of toast in the air, a finger wrapped around the handle of the cup, a vague memory, perhaps, of the last time you saw the grocer/dentist/mechanic—that pull you back to yourself, to the fleeting nature of life, to the shiver-inducing fact that that will be you one day, that it can and will all be taken away, that it can and will end. You bring the coffee cup close to your face, you need something, someone, to hold on to, to ground you, to bring you back to the small moments of life and not the vast, cold universe where death awaits. Best to table that thought. Time to butter the toast now, to make a list, to begin another day with the assumption, the hope, please God, that there will be so many more, that they won’t just end. So your mind, on overload, thinks of the day to come, the errands to run, the meetings, so much to do. Too early for existential dread. But then your wife, your husband, your partner enters the kitchen, heading for the coffee, and doesn’t understand the hug, the intensity of it this early, doesn’t understand that you’ve been reading an obituary and drifted, if just for a moment, to wondering about your own.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“There was—is—a meaning to the writing of an obituary that transcends the filing of a daily news story. Whole lives. I found it strangely life-affirming, oddly thrilling, this thing where you tried, if only briefly, to capture the essence of someone’s life.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“What would you write if you had to write your obituary? Today, right now. What comes to mind? What memories, days, moments? What people and experiences? I realize, at first glance, that the idea of writing one’s own obituary while still alive may sound morbid. It’s not, though. I promise you. It’s a needed reminder of who you are, of what truly matters. Because it’s your life and there’s still time to write it. Before I have to.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“He paused and looked down. “Do you honestly think, on days like today, that I’m not angry with God, that I’m not compelled to doubt, to swear and scream as I put these garments on? I am. And may God forgive me. Until I see her family’s faces. Know that she lives on through them. That she wills us, urges us, to live. Right now. Because this is it. The thing we’ve been waiting for? It’s right here, right now, in front of us. Do it now. Whatever it is. Do that thing that honors life.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“They said we should ask ourselves, when the thoughts get weird, is it true? Is the thought true?” “Then what?” “Ask what happens when you believe that thought. Then ask who you would be without the thought. The thoughts, the stories and narratives … they’re lies. But we live every moment as if they’re true.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“Is that why you can’t sit? I have sciatica sometimes. I have to stand all day working. And once a particularly savage case of hemorrhoids.” I couldn’t stop talking. I hated myself.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“This is it, the thing we’ve been waiting for. It’s right here right now in front of us. Do it now. Whatever it is, do that thing that honors life.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“The obituary (I didn’t write it) was both poorly written and factually inaccurate, stating that she “passed during an unexpected incident with a kiwi in the aisle of a local supermarket.” (I thought this unfortunate wording, as it sounded to me like an untoward tryst with a New Zealander.)”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“spent an unimpressive four years in college, neither lazy nor diligent (potential gravestone epitaph?),”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“Do you know what an obituary writer is? Well, neither did I. It is a person who writes about dead people. But isn’t that sad? you might ask me. No, it isn’t, because to do a good job you have to write about their life and the good things because that’s what life is. When someone writes your obituary, you will like it because you will have laughed a lot during your life and you had friends and a dog and went to birthday parties with balloons and to the beach and so many things that at night, each night, when you go to bed, you will think, Wasn’t that a great day.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“Tim said we are all obituary writers because we get to write our life every day. Write it. Please. It’s your life.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“Show me someone who is great with death and I’ll show you a sociopath. I”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“I’m afraid,” I said. “Of what?” “Dying. Because I’m not sure I’ve ever really lived. And I don’t know how.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“I wonder why there isn’t a rule that says that you cannot watch your mother die.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“And so the year had started, as years often do, with wide-eyed resolutions, illusions of a new life, as if the turn of a calendar page, the drop of a ball, could somehow jump-start a life in quicksand, change long-ingrained patterns.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“Louisa invited everyone back to Tim’s. There was coffee and wine and food. I don’t know how it got there but it appeared.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead

“Which is when the assembled started applauding.”
― John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead