Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/epitaph
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, receive a free spritz of language from a department store then walk around reeking of it all day.
Today we’re looking at the words that describe us long after we can speak for ourselves, with Dave Nadelberg, founder of Mortified, the podcast, stage show, Netflix show etc. Content note: death. But nothing gory or anything; just mostly about the concept.
On with the show.
DAVID NADELBERG: “Lily: a life well lived.”
HZ: “Gary. You reached for our hands and forever touched our hearts.”
DAVID NADELBERG: "She lived her life with an open heart, Aunt May.”
HZ: “A friend to animals.”
DAVID NADELBERG: "Your heart is with ours. Thoughts of you bring bring us love, laughter, joy. We will cherish you forever.”
HZ: This is sweet. "We will miss your love, zest for life and perfect smile."
DAVID NADELBERG: That’s great.
DAVID NADELBERG: You're going to hear the lovely crunch of grass. That's exciting. I do like the noise of the crunch of grass.
HZ: I'm thinking of who we're walking across.
DAVID NADELBERG: This happens to be a cemetery where both of my parents are buried, and they are buried side by side, actually.
HZ: You like to come here.
DAVID NADELBERG: For me, this is one of the most important places on earth.
HZ: “Cherished husband, father, brother, grandfather, great grandfather, friend, award winning writer, director, producer. He gave us the greatest gifts: wisdom, love and laughter," and then quotation marks,"That beautiful sound, the most gorgeous music of all, the applause of an audience. But now the program's over and I still don't know what the subject was.”
DAVID NADELBERG: Ooh, that one's in cursive. Fonts!?
HZ: You've got to be really careful with punctuation. This one says "fantastic" in quotation marks "husband, father, grandfather, brother, uncle, writer and mentor to many." The quotation marks make it seem like the fantastic is sarcastic.
DAVID NADELBERG: Yeah, that's a weird choice. Fantastic husband. Ehhh…
HZ: ”Embraced equality, knowledge, world travel and poker." That's pretty fun.
DAVID NADELBERG: "He would rather give than receive." Well, let's not read into that.
DAVID NADELBERG: There's Ronald. Ronald didn't get any epitaph.
HZ: No. Maybe no one liked him.
DAVID NADELBERG: Or, maybe they just couldn't agree.
HZ: That’s the thing. Or maybe there's too much to say.
DAVID NADELBERG: "Beloved husband, father, grandfather. Loving memories of you will live forever." That is an example - I don't mean to be mean, but that is an example of what I don't like about epitaphs. I think it's a hard thing to write epitaphs and so people don't know what to write, and so they just sort of say something. But then when you go to a cemetery, like we are now, you will see, as we walk around, they'll all kind of look or sound the same. And to me, that feels tragic and upsetting. And I feel like a jerk having any kind of judgment on this family that wrote "Loving Memories of You Will Live Forever." I guess that's nicer than "To know him is to love him." That's the one I hate. You see it all the time.
HZ: Now here's something that makes me a bit sad, Dave, is that standing here seeing several different stones saying "Forever in our hearts", you feel the lack of imagination there.
DAVID NADELBERG: Yeah. And that's what kind of pisses me off about epitaphs! It feels lazy, like this lazy send-off that a lot of people give and they just kind of throw their hands up in the air and... Anyway, so that always bums me out.
HZ: Maybe people can't come up with very personalized or witty epitaphs because they are grieving. So maybe this is really a thing that you should sort out before you die.
DAVID NADELBERG: So, that is interesting, because I know of people who have sorted that out prior to. That said: I don't know what it is amongst non-Jews, but for Jews, of which you are one, you have a year to do that. You have an unveiling a year. Your unveiling is like, oh, now there's an actual stone on the grave. We buried them a year ago, but now there's a stone on top. You wait a year to do that, so you have a year to come up with the epitaph. So your grieving theoretically could be settled.
HZ: But the problem with my grandmother, they had the year. But there were a lot of relatives to appease. So what they ended up with was something very bland because it was the only thing that all of the cousins would agree on.
DAVID NADELBERG: You come up with something and everybody bats it around and eventually you get stuck with "Beloved wife, husband and father."
HZ: Oh, this is a really good one, though. This one tells quite a lot about them. "Psychotherapist and author. Adored parents. Your lives inspire us." I feel like I get quite a lot more from that.
DAVID NADELBERG: Let's walk around the perimeter here.
HZ: “Beloved wife, mother and grandmother.” Bit reductive. Oh, two next to each other: “Beloved wife, mother and great-grandmother.” Bit of one-upping in this pair of graves.
DAVID NADELBERG: “Your love, kindness and generous heart will touch our lives forever." So there's definitely a theme of "you are permanent. You haven't died. Some part of you is still living on." That seems to be important to people. What do you think? Do you think the point of an epitaph is for the family? Because I don't; I think it's actually for us, the strangers who walk by.
HZ: I think a bit of both because I guess - I mean, you would know more than me, because I've never visited the grave of someone I'm related to, for various reasons. But when you come here, does it make you feel better to see something that means something to you?
DAVID NADELBERG: Well, so a lot of people have different opinions on, you know, I'm some on the on the meaning and purpose of a cemetery like I was. So Neil, my producing partner, his parents are buried somewhere and he does not have much of a connection to the cemetery because, of course, this is not what he associates with his parents. His parents are not a slab of stone on top of some grass somewhere. Whereas, I also don't have a connection to my parents being here. But for me, I see a cemetery as a real place of solace and a great place to go and be present and just cut out the world and just be you for a moment. And to me, that's the gift of a cemetery. I love cemeteries; I do not see them as depressing at all.
HZ: When you come here to visit your parents and you look at the stones, how do you feel about them?
DAVID NADELBERG: I feel a tremendous sense of gravity. I feel as quiet as the stones are. I don't think I've ever articulated that, but when I think about it here, I feel like a real sense of calm. And I think the fact that it is just this quiet slab of stone that feels permanent - like rock is is older than us.
HZ: By quite some way.
DAVID NADELBERG: Yeah. By quite some way. I don't love the concept of burial. I think burial has a lot of ethical problems; but it's really important, I think, when somebody is gone, to have a place that they can go to grieve.
HZ: Which direction are your folks?
DAVID NADELBERG: Right in front of that tree. Let's go visit Steve and Judy.
DAVID NADELBERG: This is my parents.
HZ: "Beloved wife, mother, grandmother, friend and teacher. She made the world a better place." No one could mind that being their epitaph.
DAVID NADELBERG: Yeah. So that my dad came up with, "She made the world a better place." I like that. We did have family internal debates about that because I think he wanted it to be about like “teacher, she was great with children” and all this. And I had a big heart-to-heart with my dad, and I said I don't like that we're reducing this person to being like - first of all, I don't agree that she was this amazing person with children. I think she was a human being. I think she was really complicated with children. But I also don't think we should just reduce her to this thing. But of course, an epitaph is reducing you to a thing. So that's sort of a confusing note that I gave. But anyway, he came up with something that I found sweeter and definitely is not something that you see anywhere else in the cemetery, which is why I liked it. "She made the world a better place.”
HZ: But that is a really good eternal sentiment. Like that one won't age.
DAVID NADELBERG: Yeah. And then seven years later, my dad wound up parking right next to her, unfortunately.
HZ: "Beloved husband, father, grandfather and friend. Every relative, every friend, every stranger knew they mattered around you."
DAVID NADELBERG: Yeah, I wrote that.
HZ: That's very nice.
DAVID NADELBERG: I came up with that. I wrote a bunch of people and I said, "Don't give me a clever phrase. When you think about my dad, when you think about Steve, what do you think of? I don't care if it's a story you think of or like a phrase or a word.” And it was actually a friend of mine, she said, "you know, your dad, he always made me feel like I mattered." I said, “That's it.” So we went shopping for a phrase for a while and I had seven years between the two deaths to really think about it. In those seven years, I was sitting next to my mom's grave, on what is now this spot that had been reserved for my father's grave. I just wanted to kind of be there and connect. I had a lot of unresolved issues with her also, so I feel like I wanted to be there to, I don't know, connect to whatever physical thing that I could and also just kind of reflect on the relationship.
And I started kind of looking around at the other stones and I started getting curious about their lives and looking at the epitaphs. And I started noticing so many of the epitaphs, I think partially because we were we were trying to figure out what was my mom's epitaph going to be, and I wanted to know who is buried here? Who are their neighbours, who are their roommates essentially for eternity? And I felt really sad that I couldn't get a flavour of their personality. And that's all you're really looking for, I think, with an epitaph, is just a flavour. So that made it really important to write. And that was it: "Every relative, every friend, every stranger knew they mattered around you." We were gonna write, "Whoa, big stuff!" because that's what my dad said every time dessert would come. Like, he would be like, "Whoaaa! You're going to order that!" That's like one example of one of those things that only makes people in your family laugh.
You can't understand that without context. And the idea is that you want to shout to the world, "This person mattered and this person existed." And so that's why I find it sad, and a real missed opportunity, when epitaphs are kind of - when they just say like, "To know him is to love him" or just some generic "He did it his way" like some sort of Sinatra thing. And I just I'm like, you know that that's what everyone writes, just look around.
HZ: Well, “To know him is to love him” - you can't know him because he's dead, so that’s a tease.
DAVID NADELBERG: It's kind of rude, really. It's mocking him.
HZ: It's mocking all the all of the people that want to know about him.
DAVID NADELBERG: Yeah. And so I actually I know you're joking, but like, that's exactly the the reason that I got passionate about - Like you should write something at least distinct. These lives deserve better. And I know it's hard to come up with something, but we're all smart enough to figure out how to not die every day, so we can we can put a couple of brain cells together for that. I don't know, is it rude to be like, “that's not good enough”? And I would argue: if it's super generic, like I really believe that the point of these epigraphs, epitaphs, it is mostly like you're creating this billboard for this person's life, so you want anyone who might even walk by to be like, “Yes, that was a person and that person mattered.” And I get kind of indignant about it because I believe that all these people mattered. I guess you could listen to this and think, you know, I or by you being my accomplice, I guess, that we are being complete obnoxious assholes for judging people's epitaphs. And that would be your right to do. I think what I want is I want these vibrant people to be brought out just a little bit and kept alive just a little bit. So it comes from that place. You can still think I'm a jerk or judgmental.
HZ: That's what I'm going to put on your gravestone. “Judgmental jerk Dave Nadelberg.”
DAVID NADELBERG: Well, interestingly, I have thought about what would I write on my stone? And then I had a funny one, which is at the end of Mortified, there’s a phrase of every episode of the podcast or the TV show or the stage show, which is, "We are freaks, we are fragile and we all survived." And then it would say, "Except for him".
HZ: Do you think that one reason why people skew to the bland is because these things have to work long time and some things don't really age because they were never super relevant, but it means they never become irrelevant.
DAVID NADELBERG: I think that's an interesting thought. I honestly think the reason is it's too much pressure.
HZ: I'm thinking about what I would have on mine now. And it is too much. I can't think of anything.
DAVID NADELBERG: It's too much pressure. But I do think it's worth like we should have parties and like and they don't have to be like one day events. But like, you know, like a three or four instalment kind of like workshop party kind of thing that like you go and you kind of work on like here's some ideas for a tombstone should be like, just see how that and build that into your will. And it's also a fun excuse to get drunk with your friends.
HZ: I suppose when you start thinking, how would I want to be remembered? What are the parts of my life are meaningful? Those are hard things to think about.
DAVID NADELBERG: And how do you distil a human life into five words?
HZ: Because you also you don't want to text-heavy a grave, because then it becomes counterproductive after a paragraph.
HZ: That is minimal. Just name and date.
DAVID NADELBERG: Just a year. Not even like the month.
HZ: Yeah. There's not a lot of lowercase fonts on these.
DAVID NADELBERG: Interesting. Yeah. It's almost all caps. And yet we don't read them like they're all caps. "BELOVED HUSBAND, FATHER, WE LOVED HIM FOREVER. YOU ARE STILL IN OUR HEARTS.”
HZ: This is unusual, isn't it? Upper and lower case.
DAVID NADELBERG: This is the font that they made fun of on Saturday Night Live. What's this font? Papyrus? You got buried in Papyrus!
HZ: Ouch!
DAVID NADELBERG: I'm not going to read this one because I don't want to insult this person, but…
HZ: They've already been insulted by the font.
HZ: Oh, we're getting some good ones now.
DAVID NADELBERG: Yeah. This is the better area.
HZ: "Boomp diddy adda boomp boomp."
DAVID NADELBERG: “Boom diddy adda boomp boomp.” Wait. This is. Hold on a second. This is a double tombstone or gravestone. So it's "Selma. Lived, loved, laughed.” Nathan, that literally says "Boomp diddy adda boomp boomp.” That's the best one! “Boom diddy adda boomp boomp.”
HZ: "Naomi: remembered for great generosity, a warm heart, intelligence and humour. Her enormous strength and independence taught us all. She was a woman before her time.”
DAVID NADELBERG: This word I like: ‘adored’. “Loved, adored and sadly missed.”
HZ: OK, this is interesting. "Adoring father, beloved husband, dedicated physician, ardent scholar, ever enriching the lives of his family, his colleagues and the world around him.”
DAVID NADELBERG: And it's written on a big icon of a book. So they want to really push that. I like that, I get a sense of who that person is and what was important to that person.
HZ: Yeah, there's a lot of adjectives here compared to a lot of them, where it just says 'Beloved', which is about your feelings about them rather than who they were.
HZ: Oh, this looks fun. "Poet, artist, art historian, historian. Innovative, proud, heroic mom, elegant, and extraordinary. El Condor Pasa.”
DAVID NADELBERG: Oh yeah, that’s great! I love this. "Stewart. Advocate for the downtrodden." And there's an icon or an emoji of legal scales. So clearly he was not just an advocate, but like a he was a good judge or a lawyer.
HZ: Or he loved weighing things.
DAVID NADELBERG: He loved weighing things.
HZ: Wow, I like this: "Sweet and strong with a golden wit.” This one's after my heart too: “Gentle and kind soul with the heart of a lion."
DAVID NADELBERG: That’s cool.
HZ: It is cool.
DAVID NADELBERG: Lion. He looks like a sweet accountant. And so now we have this trend on gravestones where you are seeing photographs and other things. Which are in some ways another version of an epitaph. They're summarising, they're giving you information about the person.
HZ: You probably get graves now that have a QR code on them so you can get like a fuller amount of information on someone.
DAVID NADELBERG: Fascinating. I bet that exists.
HZ: Or one of those USB photo frames where you could have pictures -
DAVID NADELBERG: - Changing.
HZ: Because is there a particular time in your life where you think, “That's the photo I'd want on my permanent marker”?
DAVID NADELBERG: This one's long, this one’s very long-winded, which I like. They're like, we've got all this space. Let's use it. "Extraordinary musician and human being full of compassion and generosity. Your humour, spirit, passion for life and love for your family will always live in our hearts together forever. Siempre juntos."
HZ: That is a lot. But it's not like the stone is significantly bigger.
DAVID NADELBERG: No, they've just crammed it all in. Yeah. And still found room for "Beloved husband, father, grandfather and friend."
HZ: And also there's a picture of him.
DAVID NADELBERG: In a bow tie.
HZ: I can't quite date it, but he looks like a matinee idol of the golden age of cinema in the photo.
DAVID NADELBERG: And there’s even Spanish - “Siempre juntos” - and Hebrew.
HZ: So in just a foot and a half by two feet, you've got three languages, you've got plenty of information about him privately and professionally, and spiritually. And a photo.
HZ: “I've loved you dearly, more dearly than the spoken word can tell.”
DAVID NADELBERG: Fantastic.
HZ: She loved her family like she loved her poker: all in" and five engraved playing cards.
DAVID NADELBERG: All in is in quotes. That's great.
HZ: That is a fun epitaph.
DAVID NADELBERG: “Jan: small in stature, big of heart, a giant in the food world, zany in humour, committed to community. Our loss is unfathomable. Loving wife, daughter, sister, friend and mentor." I love mentor.
HZ: Yes, that was a real surprise at the end. Great!
DAVID NADELBERG: Well done, Jan's friends and family.
HZ: You've given us information about her physique, her personality, a profession, her humour and her interaction with the world and your feelings about it. It's amazing.
DAVID NADELBERG: I love that it clearly mattered to them that she was zany in humour.
HZ: Do you have any suggestions for people to figure out what to put on stones?
DAVID NADELBERG: Identify why you want an epitaph, what the point is for you. If you agree with me that the main purpose of that epitaph is to sort of honour this person's life for the general public to see, then try your best to come up with something that doesn't have to be clever, but just has to be unique, and that gives me the flavour of this person. And so you can interview those who knew this person and say, “What do you think of when you think of this person?” And they'll just instinctively say certain things. And when you ask five to ten people, you'll start to notice a pattern. And, you know, you might notice three patterns, but then you can pick one. If you screw it up, there's no consequence.
HZ: Well, it's only written in stone forever. So, arguably...
DAVID NADELBERG: That’s true. I guess there is a consequence. But it's not like the deceased is going to be mad at you.
HZ: David Nadelberg is the founder of Mortified. Find the Mortified podcast, books, live event listings and TV shows and documentary at getmortified.com. And in today’s Minillusionist, we return to the cemetery to find the grave of...David Nadelberg??
MINILLUSIONIST
DAVID NADELBERG: All right. So we are we are looking at the map. We're looking at a map of a cemetery. And we're in my car. And we are looking for a certain grave that I have since discovered through a Google search. And the grave that we are looking for is a person named David Nadelberg.
HZ: We're looking for your grave.
DAVID NADELBERG: We're looking for me, my grave.
I actually for years thought I was the only David Nadelberg in existence.
HZ: Is it a rare combination?
DAVID NADELBERG: Nadelberg is not a common name. And I have googled my name a bunch and I've never come across any David Nadelberg until very recently.
HZ: You’ve come acrosshe late David Nadelberg.
DAVID NADELBERG: And not only that, it's the cemetery where my parents happen to be buried.
HZ: So a place you've been coming to a lot. You were here this whole time.
DAVID NADELBERG: I was here this entire time, dead. And we're gonna go find me. We're gonna go find dead me. What if I turn out to be the dead me and we meet dead me and it's like -
HZ: Like a body swap?
DAVID NADELBERG: Yeah. It'd be a really adorable body switch movie.
HZ: We're making light of it. What if you see a grave with your name on it and you feel upset and disturbed?
DAVID NADELBERG: I am actually a little stressed out about it. I feel a little uncomfortable about this. I mean I'm super excited, but mostly I'm also curious. Like what is his epitaph and what if I don't like it? I only know very little things about David Nadelberg, the dead one.
HZ: I've never had the experience of encountering a grave with my name on or indeed anyone else with my name. Like you, I currently think I'm the only one.
DAVID NADELBERG: What if we look to the left of the David Nadelberg grave and we find a Helen Zaltzman grave?
HZ: Oh my goodness!
DAVID NADELBERG: ...I think that’s me with the American flag.
HZ: Oh, you're here! You're right here. This is a two person plaque. Your grass has recently been cut.
DAVID NADELBERG: That's weird, that is WEIRD!
HZ: Who's your wife? I'm just gonna clear some grass off.
DAVID NADELBERG: Oh my God.
HZ: No!
DAVID NADELBERG: No!! First of all, that's my grandmother's name. The middle name, your name.
HZ: Sylvia Helen Nadelberg and David Nadelberg.
DAVID NADELBERG: What did I just say a second ago? That we will find you right next to me and you're literally buried with me.
HZ: What a way to go into eternity. "Loving husband, father and grandfather." How do you feel looking at the grave with your name on and on dates? You weren't born in 1910.
DAVID NADELBERG: How do I feel? Er. I'm feeling… It's weird. I'm seeing this name, the letters that I've seen all my life. I've gotten married apparently in life. I've had kids and they've had kids. I don't have a lot in common with this David Nadelberg, is I guess my point.
HZ: There's so little information that he could like all of your favourite bands pre-1990.
DAVID NADELBERG: But in terms of uh, life -
HZ: - life marks.
DAVID NADELBERG: Yeah. I've not been married, no children, no plans for children ever. And therefore they will never have children. So I will not become a grandfather. There's some nice artwork on this. So there's flowers I like.
HZ: There's a lovely border. It's quite nice a shade as well. It's got sort of pinkish tinge, greenish tinge.
DAVID NADELBERG: The lettering is a little off. Do you notice that the A and the V are a little not aligned? They're sort of crooked.
HZ: Yeah, the A's have come out a bit taller than the adjacent letters.
DAVID NADELBERG: A little bit like a ransom note.
So, yeah. So here we are. We're standing at my grave. Am I glad that I'm here seeing it? Yeah. I'm having very little reaction to this. I honestly thought it would be a little more momentous. I don't know what I thought, but I just I when I first saw the letters a second ago, it did give me chills to be like, whoaaaa. If I was name like John Smith, I think I would have no reaction.
HZ: But if you’ve only ever seen this words as referring to you ever…
DAVID NADELBERG: Yeah, these letters, this combination...
HZ: I hope he had a good time with the name while he was alive with it.
DAVID NADELBERG: Yeah. I wonder if people called him like Noodles or Noodleberg.
HZ: Davelberg.
DAVID NADELBERG: Davelberg or Sinadel'Connor or something. They probably did not call him that.
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This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, with music by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com.
If you’ve dealt with the decision of what to write as an epitaph, let us know: find @allusionistshow on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Any advice would be useful, for writing one for someone else - or have you decided what you want your own epitaph to be? I’ve been thinking I don’t want one at all; after my grandmother’s tombstone got a typo on it, I can’t take that risk.
You can hear or read every episode of the Allusionist, see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, check out Allusionist merch, find event listings, all at theallusionist.org.
