Jim Carroll Band - People Who Died

Wanting to be prepared for and appreciate the future we will all experience, I signed up for a 'Befriending Death' class

To those who received this piece via email, I apologize for the old message at the top about this being a repeat of an old essay. It’s not! It’s brand new, I just forgot to delete the old header!

“It’s a lot to learn to sit with things you can’t change.”

Dr. BJ Miller, author of A Beginner’s Guide to the End, and former Executive Director of San Francisco Zen Hospice

People Who Died - Nana Muriel

When I was in my early 20s, I watched my father more-or-less check out when his mother, my Nana Muriel, was in the hospital dying of stomach cancer. He rarely visited her in the hospital, and the times he did, it was for, at most, ten minutes.

He was a Mama’s Boy, and losing the woman who doted on him, bought him nice clothes, and cooked the family delicious meals was too much to bear. I understood this level of overwhelm. I felt it too. I was a Nana’s Boy and loved Muriel with every fiber of my being. She was feisty, funny, and unflappable. She took no shit from anyone. I’m convinced that Nana Muriel lacked the embarrassment gene. (It skipped right over to me.)

Once I was old enough to drive, I’d take Nana out to lunch on the first Sunday of every month at her favorite restaurant, Carl’s Jr. She’d order a burger, small fries, and black coffee. On the way to our table, she’d load her oversized purse with as many sugar, Sweet’N Low, and non-dairy creamer packets as she could fit. Once, I watched her shove an entire napkin dispenser into her bag.

“What?” she’d said after noticing my wide-eyed, gap-mouthed shock. “They have a million more in the back. Dontcha think this will look perfect on the dining room table, Tatale?”

At her 70th birthday dinner party at The Cheesecake Factory, when the young female server approached her to take her order, my Nana pointed at the adult beverages menu and asked, “What’s this Sex On the Beach? Is it good? Have you ever had Sex on the Beach? What’s it like?”

My sister Lisa and I busted up laughing to the point of crying, while the faces of the adults in the family turned as crimson as the servers'. Nana’s beaming smile at seeing her grandkids appreciating her comedic performance was the best present she could have ever asked for.

I recounted both of these stories at Nana’s funeral as part of her eulogy. Afterward, at the reception, Nana’s sisters Shirley and Sylvia both came up to me, beaming.

“What you said about Muriel, it made me laugh, and it made me cry.”

“I’d love it if you could write a eulogy for me when I die,” Sylvia added.

“Yes, and if you’re able to write one for me as well,” Shirley said, not wanting to be left out of my apparent complementary eulogy service.

I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the reason the eulogy for their sister Muriel hit them emotionally was because of the deep, loving relationship I had with my Nana. I barely knew Shirley and Sylvia other than they liked to cut coupons and gossip about which of their neighbors was about to have surgery.

Muriel wasn’t my first grandparent to die, but I never got to know Nana Betty, my mom’s mom, who passed away when I was eight. And I wasn’t invited to attend her funeral. So Nana Muriel was both the first death and first funeral of someone close to me.

You might think by the fact that I wrote and read my Nana’s eulogy at a funeral, that I was able to face death more directly than most young American adults. This was not the case. I was simply a good writer who could tell a heartwarming story. The prospect of death still scared the crap out of me.

Let’s Chat About Death - A practical and spiritual approach to befriending death & dying

I’ve been taking care of my aunt, who has Alzheimer’s, since 2020. I’m in the process of moving her into a memory care facility as I write this.

My dad is 85, and my mother is 80. Dad is in the early stages of dementia but is still able to drive short distances. Neither parent is in optimal health. As their only living child, I’ll likely become intimately involved in their care in the not-too-distant future. An anxiety sufferer for most of my life, it doesn’t take much to set my phasers to overwhelm when imagining an endless variety of unpleasant future scenarios.

If only there were a resource I could find that might help me navigate the labyrinthian bureaucratic nightmare that I call The Death and Dying Industries. This would include hospitals, assisted living facilities, insurance companies, wills, trusts, DPOAs, POLSTS, palliative care, hospice, cremation, green burial, and so much more.

Amazingly, while taking a meditation class a few months ago, the teacher mentioned that he’d recently taken a 6-week online class on befriending death. He told us that the class helped him process his father’s death and lessen his fear and anxiety around his own inevitable death and the death of his loved ones.

As soon as the meditation gathering ended, I logged onto the Befriending Death website and signed up for the next cohort. I desperately needed to befriend death. Or at least become decent acquaintances with it.

The class started last month. I’m currently in week 5 of 6, and it’s been enormously supportive and informative. The “required reading” for the course is Sallie Tisdale’s book Advice for Future Corpses: A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying.

This book should be required reading for all adults. It’s practical, wise, funny, and blunt: and it touches on countless issues we humans face when dealing with the eventual deaths of not just our friends and family but ourselves.

One assignment given to us in week four was to choose a song about death that has left a strong impact on us and share it with the group. Before I could begin to contemplate the vast discography in my brain, The Jim Carroll Band’s “People Who Died” jumped out, waving its arms and crying, “Pick me! Pick me!”

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All My Friends, They Died - Jim Carroll

Jim Carroll, author, poet, memoirist, and musician, was best known for his 1978 autobiographical book The Basketball Diaries. The book chronicles in grungy detail how, in a few short months, he went from being a Catholic high school basketball star to becoming a strung-out heroin addict turning tricks for drugs.

The book was adapted into a movie, released in 1995 and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. I didn’t see it, nor did I read the source material, so can’t comment on either. But it appears the film did not receive very good reviews.

During his late teens and early 20s, Carroll hung out at the Chelsea Hotel, hobnobbing with the likes of Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, and Patti Smith. He apparently was a roommate of Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. It was Patti Smith who convinced Carroll to turn his poems into lyrics and start a band.

A year after Basketball Diaries would gain critical and commercial success, The Jim Carroll Band’s debut album Catholic Boy was released to critical and public acclaim. The album cover features Jim standing between his father and mother, the three of them in vibrant colors. The first single, “People Who Died,” would make it to No. 103 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart. I have no idea what that chart is, but I bet one of my super-smart readers does! Let us know in the comments.

“People Who Died” is a speak-sing litany of all the friends of Carroll who had died, most in gruesome fashion. Carroll’s beat-cool vocal delivery, paired with the band’s modified Chuck Berry blues groove, gives the song a celebratory energy. It’s never dour or depressing; it feels like a party, an honoring of the people in Carroll’s life who died. Having a chorus of backing vocalists joining in on the chorus — “Those are people who died, died! All my friends, they died!” — in a sense, brings his friends back to life. It provides a feeling of community, of communion. No matter how lonely some of them may have felt in their darkest days, they will never be alone. They are forever part of the largest family in existence, the family of those who’ve passed. “People Who Died,” to me, is the punk rock version of one of those “In Memoriam” montages at the Oscars.

A sampling of the lyrics:

Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from his cell in the Tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you, brother

Carroll would go on to record several more records from 1979 to 2000. Some were rock and roll records, and others were spoken word. He also collaborated with a ton of great bands and artists, including Lou Reed, Boz Scaggs, Blue Oyster Cult, Rancid, ELO, Pearl Jam, and more. I have only heard Catholic Boy so far, so if any Jim Carroll fanatics are reading this, leave a comment on which of his other albums are must listens.

Carroll remained clean since going sober in the late ‘70s. He died in 2009 at the age of 60 from a heart attack.

As “People Who Died” has been covered by countless others, I would assume the lyrics in many of them have been rewritten to honor the one and only, the original, Jim Carroll. Take it away Gwar.

• I’m grateful that I didn’t have the experience of losing many friends or family as a young person. If I were to have written a song titled “People Who Died” when I was 21, it would have been maybe 30 seconds long and include two not-so-close friends and my Nana Betty, who died when I was eight. It would not have reached 103 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 Chart.

• I am trying to get a handle on this death and dying stuff. Some people might see my talking about death and taking a befriending death class as some sort of morbid curiosity. I see it as exactly the opposite. To befriend death is to be grateful for life. It’s a way to never take it for granted. It’s a way to be a better friend and to be better able to support our loved ones who do get sick and die.

• If you are interested in learning more about the Befriending Death Course, send me a message.

• One song that a fellow class attendee shared in group as a favorite song related to death was The Avett Brothers, “No Hard Feelings.” What a gorgeous, gut-punch of a song. I think I’ll end with that.