The Grim Reaper was too busy laughing

Earlier this year, Robert Kennedy Jr. had an interview on his Ring of Fire radio show with Art Buchwald, who had decided in February he'd had a good run of things, didn't want to live as a dialysis-dependent patient, and checked himself into a hospice for a quiet, dignified, hopefully pain-free departure. While in the hospice, he entertained an endless variety of visitors, all of whom came to pay respects, to laugh, to reminisce, and to say goodbye.

How many of us get to go out that way -- surrounded by friends, having lived a good, productive life, controlling our own destiny every step of the way?

Not even Art Buchwald, apparently, because it is now September -- and Art Buchwald has defied the doctors and all seeming logic and is still kicking:

[...] a funny thing happened to the man who has spent his life making readers laugh.

He lived.

So he did what he has done every summer since the mid-1960s. He came to Martha's Vineyard. He shows no signs of dying here, either.

"The prognosis is good because no one understands it," Buchwald said, sitting in a hospital chair on the porch overlooking the backyard of his summer home. "My doctors have no thoughts on it anymore. They call me a miracle. So, OK, I'm a miracle."

With a new — or at least extended — lease on life, Buchwald, 80, has resumed writing his column. He has dealt in recent weeks not only with his own remarkable story but also with the topical subjects that have always been his stock in trade: imagining Mel Gibson at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting after his drunken run-in with a sheriff's deputy, and speculating that when President Bush vetoed a measure on stem cell research, he actually thought he was vetoing cell phone legislation.

He has also recently completed a book about his decision to die and his body's decision to live. Titled Too Soon to Say Goodbye, it will be published in the fall and includes some of the eulogies that famous friends such as Tom Brokaw and Vineyard neighbor Mike Wallace wrote for his funeral, as well as the lyrics that another Vineyard friend, singer Carly Simon, wrote for that final goodbye.

"I told them, 'I'm not going to be cheated out of a funeral,' " he said.

The latest — and what Buchwald thought would be the last — chapter of his long life began when his right leg was amputated below the knee because of a circulatory problem.

That led the Pulitzer Prize winner to decide not to go through the debilitating dialysis sessions that were required to treat his failing kidneys. Instead he moved into the hospice.

"I went in with the intention of dying in three weeks," he said, his gravelly voice still bearing the broad accent of his native New York. "I thought about my life, and I thought, what the hell. I've had a good life. Why should I want to stick around?"

His friends in the media and in government practically lined up to pay a final visit.

"I had what is called a salon," he said, elongating the word for comic effect. "I became a big deal. 'You have to see Buchwald.'"

[snip]

"I got everybody dropping in, but not with the same fear and fervor as the people who came to see me in the home," Buchwald said, referring to the hospice. "They thought they were coming to see someone who was going to die."

All the attention has one drawback, however.

"The only bad thing is that you've got to feed them all," he said.