The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
William Shakespeare
Lindsey Graham is dead. As dead as a doornail, and I’ll ask you to remember, as Dickens insisted we remember about old Marley, that this must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I mean to tell.
The senator from South Carolina died Saturday night after a brief and sudden illness, seventy-one years old, home from a trip to Ukraine, gone before most of the country had finished dinner. That is the whole of it. The rest—the eulogies, the sneers, the careful weighing of a man on scales he can no longer read—belongs entirely to us.
I did not agree with Lindsey Graham about much. I spent twenty years in law enforcement watching what happens when institutions decide that winning matters more than being right, and I saw in his long career a man who bent, more than once, in directions I could not follow. I could make the list. So could you. But I am not going to make it today, and the reason has nothing to do with him.
It has to do with what the making of that list would do to me.
Here is a thing I have come to believe, and it took me longer than it should have. When we celebrate the death of a man we disagreed with, we do not touch him at all. We cannot. Whatever chain he forged in life—link by link, choice by choice, the ledger of compromises and convictions and cruelties and kindnesses that any life becomes—that chain was finished the moment his heart stopped. It is complete. No one can add a single link to it now, not his admirers with their tributes and not his enemies with their applause. The dead are beyond our reach. That is the terror and the mercy of death both: the account is closed.
What we can do—the only thing celebration accomplishes—is add links to our own.
Marley’s ghost came to Scrooge dragging a chain he had made himself, “link by link, and yard by yard,” and the horror of it was that Scrooge could not see his own, though it was every bit as long and growing longer by the hour. That is the trap of dancing on a grave. You think you are passing judgment on the man in the ground. You are only forging iron for yourself, and you are doing it in public, where everyone but you can see the metal.
The person who cheers a death does not wound the dead. He reveals himself. He tells the world that his own convictions were never strong enough to stand on their merits—that they needed an enemy’s corpse to feel like victory. There is a name for the impulse to gloat over a fallen adversary, and the name is not righteousness. It is immaturity. It is the small, sugared satisfaction of a child who has been told, finally, that the person he feared can no longer come to the door. Grown men and women are meant to grow past it. Some never do, and you can watch them, in the hours after any prominent death, competing to see who can be the ugliest fastest, mistaking cruelty for courage.
I want to be careful here, because I am not asking anyone to lie. Honesty about the dead is not the same as celebration of the dead, and I have no patience for the fiction that death launders a life. It doesn’t. Graham’s record is what it was; history will read it with a colder eye than any of us can manage this weekend, and it should. The historian’s ledger and the mourner’s silence are different instruments, and a serious person knows which one he is holding. To insist on the truth of a man’s public life is the work of citizenship. To throw a party because his private one has ended is something else, and it curdles the truth-telling it pretends to serve.
Lincoln, at the edge of a war he could not stop, closed his first inaugural by appealing to what he called the better angels of our nature. He was speaking to a country that was already reaching for its rifles, and he lost that argument, at least for four bloody years. But the phrase survived because it named something real: that inside each of us there is a party of the better and a party of the worse, and that they are always, always at the ballot box. A death—anyone’s death, a rival’s most of all—is a day when both parties turn out in force. The worse angels arrive with a song already written. The better ones arrive with nothing but restraint, which never trends and never satisfies and is the harder thing by far.
I don’t ask you to grieve a man you never trusted. I ask something smaller and, I think, more difficult. When the news of an enemy’s death arrives and you feel that first warm flicker of gladness rise in your chest—and it will, I feel it too, I am not writing this from above the fray but from inside it—I ask you to notice the sound it makes. That clink you hear is not his chain. It is yours.
Set the link down. Let the dead be dead. And let the rest of us get on with the far more demanding work of being worth remembering ourselves.
— Joe Broadmeadow
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