Still Living It Up
Washington Hospice Benefit Features Famous Former Resident Art Buchwald

By Jose Antonio Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 11, 2006

Life can't imitate Art.

He even managed to come out of a hospice alive.

And with another book to his name.

Appropriately enough, humorist Art Buchwald's latest tome is titled "Too Soon to Say Goodbye." The subtitle elaborates: "I don't know where I'm going. I don't even know why I'm here!" Very Buchwald.

At the Mayflower Hotel last night, a benefit dinner for the Washington Home and Community Hospices -- where Buchwald stayed for five months earlier this year -- also served as a book party of sorts, although a book party at which 370 guests paid $350 a pop.

Ethel Kennedy, a longtime friend, was there. So was Jack Valenti, who's known his old buddy since 1964. "I told Art, 'The next time you go to a hospice, die for God's sake,' " he said. Ben Bradlee introduced the man of the hour.

An author can never plug a book too much, Buchwald knows, and he worked the crowd from his wheelchair, debonair in a tux, a ginger ale in hand. He had a few jokes up his sleeve, of course. To wit: "I felt like one of the pleasures of my dying was I wouldn't have to look at George Bush anymore."

"How do you feel, Art?" asked Jacqueline Lindsey, his daytime nurse at Washington Home. She mentioned that her patient was sometimes stubborn.

"Good enough to be here," Buchwald replied.

He wasn't supposed to be here. At least that's what the doctors said in February, when he checked into the hospice. He had refused dialysis. His diet was atrocious -- the breakfast parfait and gooey cinnamon bun from McDonald's among his favorite foods. He was all packed and ready to go, but life, as life does, kept interrupting Art.

So instead of dying on cue, he started writing a book, two hours every day for a few weeks; his assistant, Cathy Crary, typed on her computer as he dictated. He left Washington Home and spent the summer on Martha's Vineyard, Mass. He resumed writing his twice-weekly syndicated humor column.

"There are two ways to die," Buchwald said last night. "If you're ready, you say you're going home. If you're not ready, you say you're going to the office."

His son, Joel Buchwald, said, "He's like an Energizer Bunny -- well, an Energizer Bunny who wanted to live through another election so he could have new material."

Joel noted that his father, who had a stroke six years ago, became a poster boy for stroke. He was also a poster boy for depression. (Buchwald, Mike Wallace and the late William Styron, all close friends, called themselves the "Blues Brothers," Joel said.) Now he's a poster boy for hospices.

As Joel asked, "Who else can write a book after leaving one?"

The man who wouldn't die also has written a book that can't end. It has an afterword, also titled "Too Soon to Say Goodbye." And then it has an epilogue. The latter is a collection of eulogies -- "In case of being memorialized after my death, I get to read what they were going to say now," he writes -- from Bradlee, Wallace, Tom Brokaw, George Stevens Jr., Ken Starr and Buchwald's doctor, Michael Newman.

"The individual in question is, plain and simple, a fraud, a publicity-seeking, lying, greedy fraud," wrote Wallace.

When Buchwald spoke last night, plugging his new volume to the roomful of friends, relatives and admirers, the biggest laugh came from his Donald Rumsfeld story, which is on Page 82. The recently ousted defense secretary, who played tennis with Buchwald in the Gerald Ford years, visited him at the hospice. Buchwald told him: "Donald, if you ever get fired, I'll get you in a room in the hospice."

In Latin, there's a saying that goes, "Ars longa, vita brevis": Art is long, life is short.

Art Buchwald, who celebrated his birthday on Oct. 20, is 81 and, it seems, long for this Earth.