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The death of a man is such a common, everyday thing, such a common, everyday surprise, such a common, everyday jolt and pang to the survivors, that these survivors feel bound to say something about the man just gone. We follow our human need to cling to the one we lost, to recapture him with word and thought, and thus to deny the very death we set out to acknowledge. We want to be immortal in body as well as in spirit; we identify ourselves with him whom we try to revive and preserve, and thus—stilling our own death anxiety—we also experience a sense of omnipotence, a sense of mastery over death.
All this is human, and yet Jelliffe would not have approved of this expression of our human propensity. Or rather, despite the fact that he himself wrote a number of obituaries, he would have preferred that man treat death in some other, easier, less conspicuous yet more lofty manner.
I recall with not a little awe a medical meeting of some years ago. Jelliffe was scheduled to discuss one of the papers. The day before he had lost suddenly and tragically someone very close to him; it was doubtful whether he would attend the meeting. He came, and he listened, and he spoke. There was the usual Jelliffe vigor, the usual Rabelaisian turn of phrase; he was the usual, vibrant master of the platform, to whom speaking and performing were one.
Jelliffe met, bemoaned, condemned, and fought the death of man by thought and work and word, by living with all the vibrant forces of his own élan vital, by being proud of his privilege of being alive. This was his attitude not only toward the death of others, but toward his own infirmities, oncoming old age, and approaching end. He referred in a manner of contempt to some of his physical infirmities which once interfered with the continuity of a conversation we were