John Kenney on I See You’ve Called In Dead: A Laugh-out-loud Novel About Life Episode Transcript

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Mostly what I know is this. I know that you, all of us should have the answer to one question. What would you write if you had to write your obituary today, right now?

That's a short excerpt from page one of I See You've Called In Dead, a novel by author John Kenney, who is my guest today. John is the New York Times bestselling author of Love Poems for Married People and the novels Talk to Me and Truth in Advertising, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. He is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker and lives in Larchmont, New York.

Welcome, John. I absolutely loved your book and I'm so looking forward to our conversation.

JOHN KENNEY:
Thank you, Gail. It's lovely to be here.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
So here's a quick synopsis of the book without giving any spoilers. Bud Stanley is a recently divorced obituary writer who is a bit of a lost soul, but who also happens to be hilarious. Bud goes out on a blind date that ends up going horribly wrong. He goes home, has a bit too much to drink, and ends up writing his own outlandishly inaccurate obituary and submitting it through the obituary distribution system. This is an action that unfortunately for Bud, can't be reversed. His employer is justifiably not happy with him and puts him on leave. While on leave, he ends up attending the funerals of strangers and strengthening his relationships with other people in his life. And in the process, learns how to live. It sounds kind of deep and it is, but the deep stuff is tempered by some of the funniest dialogue I've read.

I was laughing out loud by page 10. So John, what made you say, "Hmm, I think I'll write a book about life, loss, and grief, but make it laugh-out-loud funny." What or who was the inspiration?

JOHN KENNEY:
That would be my brother, Tom. I'm one of six boys from a Boston Irish Catholic family, and I'm the fifth of the sixth. And Tom was a firefighter like our father and both grandfathers and was at 9/11 and breathing in some of that toxic air for seven days as a search and rescue worker and several years later developed pancreatic cancer. And my brothers and I would visit him. This was 2018. And I'm sorry, that's 2019. Forgive me, Tom. We would visit him every few weeks. He was living on Cape Cod. I would drive up from New York and my brothers would drive down from Boston and we would sit and make fun of him, which was our way of expressing love. Towards the very end, his wife called and said, "You should get up here." I arrived first and Tom was sitting in a reclining chair with a blanket over him.

He was a tall, handsome guy with a handlebar mustache and a guy I described as best photographed in Sepia. And we chatted for a bit and I heard a car pull into the driveway and saw that it was my other four brothers. And I turned to Tom and said, "The others are here." And quick as a cat, he dropped an arm off the side of the chair and dropped his head to one side and trying to suppress a grin said, "Tell them they're too late." And I laughed, but I was also in sort of shock. And this was a man who would be dead in two weeks. And what struck me is his humor and grace and courage in the face of the great unknown. And I thought, "I want that." It's such a universal thing, especially for your listeners and the people who do the important work of managing and directing grief and funerals and this sort of last goodbye.

And I don't know, I don't have much of a vocabulary around death. I grew up, as I said, Irish Catholic, and so I've been to what I think is maybe more than my fair share of wakes and funerals, but I always feel a little awkward in that long line and I'm not quite sure what to say or do with my hands. And so I was intrigued by that, but my brother Tom is definitely the inspiration for the book and it's actually dedicated to him.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Was Tom funny throughout his life?

JOHN KENNEY:
Yeah. All of my brothers, I am by far the least funny Kenney. My dad was a really funny guy and all of my brothers are just wickedly quick, funny, sharp guys. My mother was the sort of center of the family. She was just this open, gregarious person who loved people. That's such a sort of cliched phrase, but she genuinely did. She was really interested in people and their stories and welcomed people into our very small home. But yeah, Tom was a man of very few words, but very quick and sarcastic. So yeah.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
I imagine being around your brothers and your dad inspired some of your direction in your writing.

JOHN KENNEY:
I think I am, like all of us, a product of a time and a place. For me, Boston in the '70s, in our little neighborhood, family dinners with the eight of us, that is a deep imprint. Yeah, language and humor and sort of these bizarre ways families communicate is ... Yeah, it's very much a part of sort of how I approach writing. I'm fascinated by how we speak, by dialogue, by saying one thing and maybe meaning another, right? It's hard to get across sometimes the big feelings that are in our head to someone else, or maybe that could just be me too.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
So Bud attends a lot of funerals in the book, and it sounds like you've been to your share of them as well. Did you base the portrayals in the book on your own experiences, or where did that content come from?

JOHN KENNEY:
I didn't base it on anything that's ever happened to me. Of the many wakes and funerals he goes to, I drew nothing from my own factual life. Certainly emotionally, as I said, I often feel a bit of anxiety and trepidation as you inch up closer to the casket, to the grieving family, but I wanted to balance that with some lightness, which is a tricky thing. It's funny because at my brother Tom's wake, in part because he was a firefighter, there were hundreds and hundreds of people, the lines stretching far around corners. So people were waiting a long time and one of my brother's two grown daughters told me a story about a woman who approached her and the first words out of her mouth were, "Geez, the line is so long. I wish there were chairs." And my niece is a very funny woman, 35 years old said, "Oh, I am so sorry." But I love that kind of awkwardness in these times of profound seriousness, right?

I love going left when you think you're going to go right. And I love ... I do believe maybe it's an Irish thing, it's certainly an English thing, the darker something gets the more potential for a little bit of humor, a little bit of lightness, right?

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Do you think the process of writing this book makes you more comfortable going to funerals and talking about death?

JOHN KENNEY:
That's a good question, and I want to answer that intelligently. I would love to say, I think the really writerly answer is absolutely, I'm a changed man and will approach these moments with tremendous gravity. I'm dope. I express myself best sitting alone in a room and trying to be thoughtful, but then I walk away from the work and I'm still the emotional numbnuts that I am. I wish I could carry ... I wish I had a script writer with me at all events so I could say the right thing at the right time. Unfortunately, most of us don't. And actually that's where life gets really interesting. What I would say is that what has changed just a bit is I think I have a slightly better understanding ... I want to say this correctly. I can close the gap a little better, but what I mean by that is, there's this wonderful ... I quote this in the book.

There's this wonderful line from the Bhagavad Gita, I think it's a 2,000 year old epic Indian poem where a wise man is asked, "What is the greatest wonder in the world?" And his answer is, "The greatest wonder in the world is that every day people die, but the living act is if there's nothing but time." That's how I wander the world most days and have. So I'll be in a rush and I'll be annoyed and someone cut me off in front of the Dunkin Donuts and the ridiculousness of life, in other words. I think maybe from the book, I am able to close the gap from the guy who cut you off at the Dunking Donuts to realizing it ain't a big deal. It's okay. It's fine. Breathe, breathe. So I can do that a little better from writing that.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
And the trick is to keep that going, right? Sometimes we do that for a while and then it goes away and we're just back to where we were before.

JOHN KENNEY:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've all been to wakes and funerals and I think there's that feeling when you leave a wake. There's sacred things, right? You're in this sacred space and there is a person who was alive a few days ago and maybe you saw them and maybe you talked on the phone and maybe you were texting something ridiculous, whatever. Now they are dead and you're looking at them and you leave. And I don't know, I find that just for a bit, time slows down a little bit. I'm a little more aware. I see things a little more clearly. And then you drive home and you heat up a Trader Joe's burrito and you watch a hockey game and you're back to yourself, right? You're back, you reset. That's just who we are. It's neither good nor bad. It is certainly not a criticism. It's not ... I am no Buddhist monk. I don't look good in saffron. I would not look good blue shaved heads. We are out there trying and failing and trying again. And yeah, it's hard to be a person, right?

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Right.

JOHN KENNEY:
It's hard to be a person.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
So as part of writing this book, did you, separate from the funerals and wakes that you might attend, did you do any other research at funeral homes or talk to any funeral directors?

JOHN KENNEY:
Yeah, I sure did. We lived, my wife and kids and I in Brooklyn for many, many years, and we moved about 20 miles north of New York City to a small town in Westchester. And I mean, I didn't know a soul, and so I'd be sort of wandering around the little town and out back of some of the buildings in the village, one summer day I saw a guy working on a beautiful old Dodge Dart. I love old cars. And we got to chatting and he was telling me about it and how he had done most of the work. And I was like, "Do you live around here?" He goes, "Yeah, that's my business right there." And it was the local funeral home. John Fox and Sons Funeral Home, his grandfather had started it in the Bronx and they had moved up to Larchmont, New York, and his father, and then he and his brother had been running it for many, many years.

And I said, "Geez, I'm writing a book about that right now, actually." And he said, "Would you like a tour." I said, "Absolutely." And so he gave me a tour of the rooms and then his sort of casket room and he said, "You want to see the prep room?" And I said, "Yeah, I would love to. " And it was a bit like the Wizard of Oz. It was like seeing behind the curtain that most of us never see. So it was very interesting. And as we're walking down the stairs to the prep room, he turned to me in all seriousness and said, "Unfortunately, I don't have a body right now." And at least I think he was serious. He could have been pulling my leg, but we go into the room and I said, "Tell me what happens from when a body arrives to the wake itself. Could you just tell me what happens?" And he did, and I won't bore your listeners who know this intimately, but it was a fascinating and sobering and sort of ... It left the lump in my throat in a way that sort of ... It is both sort of raw and ugly, but profoundly beautiful as well. He said, "The first thing we do is we wash the body." And I said, "Who does that? " He goes, "Well, I do. " And I said, "Is the water warm or cold?" He goes, "Well, I like to make it warm. I test it to make it warm." And there was something about that that absolutely floored me and I found it very beautiful being alone in the room with someone who had just died and taking that sort of care, that sort of human care, really even talking about it right now, it hits me in a certain way.

But yeah, I did, I talked with Ed and it's funny because Gail, you and I had chatted a couple of weeks ago and I shared the story with you, but when I left, I had about a 10-minute walk back to my house. And in that time, a scene, one of my favorite scenes in the book became fully formed that I ended up just writing down. And it's a scene towards the end where the main character has to go to a funeral home and puts a certain kind of shoe on the recently deceased. And I couldn't have written that if I had not sort of seen behind that curtain and had Ed Fox take the time to show me the sort of beauty really of what a funeral director does.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
That's really lovely. I think funeral directors do so much, but they're not very outspoken about it, but given the opportunity to talk about what they do, they love to talk about it. And they really do amazing and beautiful work that I don't think most people know or understand. So I'm really glad you had that experience.

JOHN KENNEY:
Yeah.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
There are a number of other characters in this book, but I hesitate to refer to them as secondary because they really play a key role in helping Bud navigate life and loss. And he really has a lot of losses in this book from his divorce, his problems with his job. But let's talk about Bud's neighbor and friend, seven-year-old Leo. It's hard not to love Leo and he brings such a great deal of depth to this story. How did you come to include him as a character and what role do you think he plays in helping Bud navigate his grief and maybe even more importantly, learn about life?

JOHN KENNEY:
Oh boy, these are very good questions and very hard. I would think as the person wrote the book, I should have answers to these. I shall quickly make some up. You would think I would know where the characters came from, but a lot of it's alchemy, right? John Le Carre, the great English writer, Irish by birth said that writers are seeds, right? We're always watching and listening for a certain cadence, for the way someone looks, for how they tell a joke. I don't know where Leo came from. They're grown now, but I have 11 nieces and nephews and I was late to have kids, even though I just ... Kids kind of kill me to quote Holden Coffield, because they're so raw and unadorned. And my daughter, for many years as a little kid, would, because she so wanted me to listen when we would have conversations, she would hold my face so I wouldn't turn my head away. When kids are little, they're right up in your face and they haven't learned the silliness of how to be an adult and the sort of all the veneers we are, we often have to wear as adults. We can't say to someone in a new business meeting, "How many butterflies have you seen?"

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Right.

JOHN KENNEY:
"Not if we want the business." Kids just say stuff, and I love that. And so, as I said, I'm intrigued by language and how we talk. Interesting people speak in a cadence and a rhythm and a subject matter that is just different, right? So I didn't really base him on anyone, but the role I think he plays, look, all of the characters in the book, and there aren't that many, are all wounded people in some capacity. They have had some kind of loss or death, somewhat recently. For Leo, it's his older sister and for Howard's boss, it's his wife. And I am intrigued by wounded people. I'm not interested in superstars and perfect people, and I'm interested in the great lot of us who walk around each day, carrying invisibly our pain and with a sort of quiet heroism. I'm fascinated by that. I'm fascinated by the idea of living with grief and this unfortunate American notion that we get over it, that we get by it, that things get better.

I'm not sure that's true in my experience. I'm not sure it's true. I think grief is this patient thing that waits for us.

We try to escape it with exercise, with drugs, with binge watching TV, with ice cream. It waits until we sort of say, "Okay, I'm ready to kind of deal with this. " And grief's like, "Okay, because I'm a tattoo, I'm with you, and I'll fade into the background at some point, but I am here, the memory of your mother, of your, God forbid, your child, of your best friend, of whoever it is, we're all going to go through it. There's no one listening to this who hasn't gone through it, isn't going to go through it. " And yet, as I said, we don't ... There's plenty of books and grief and things like that, but I don't know why it is. We learn so many different kinds of things in school, but there is no grief 101. There is no how to speak it away.

It's a strange thing to me that death is this daily occurrence, and yet it is always surprising, and we're not exactly how to deal with it. I hope that made sense.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
It does. And when I read your book, which is not officially a book about grief, but it's definitely a theme that runs throughout it, your descriptions of what it's like to grieve resonated with me more than a lot of books that I've read. I really ... I mean, I laughed hard during the first three quarters of the book. The last quarter, again, no spoilers, but I needed the Kleenex. Your descriptions of what it was like to grieve at a very primal level just seemed so spot on to me. Did your own experiences with grief inform how you portrayed grief in the book? Because I kept thinking only a person who has really grieved could write this.

JOHN KENNEY:
Yeah. Well, thank you for the kind words. I would never use myself as an example of an emotionally healthy person. My mom died when I was 12. I think I shut down pretty quickly, didn't cry at the wake or the funeral, didn't shed a tear. And I think I ... There was a ... I think I'm using this phrase, right? A sort of cognitive dissonance where I just sort of pushed it away. I was just like, "I don't think this is really true or happening," which is not uncommon in younger people, but in the past many decades, I've experienced lots of loss and grief is, I think like most emotions, it's ineffable, right? I love that we have a word in the English language whose definition is an emotion that can't be defined in words, right? How do you describe grief? I think the first line of C.S. Lewis's book on grief after he'd lost his young wife, I think I never knew that grief felt so like fear, which I think is a pretty great sentence. A dear friend of mine wrote a memoir about her son's 21-year-old son's suicide three years ago, and she wrote the memoir about her first year dealing with it, and the sort of one step from insanity daily feelings that are very hard to put into words, but she did it beautifully. It's a very, very, very difficult book to read, but I know nothing about grief that your listeners don't know. We've all been through it. It's hard to find the words to capture it, right? Sometimes you have to be with someone. You just, you go over to their house and you sit and you watch Sports Center or you go for a walk and maybe you talk and maybe you don't.

It's grief too is sort of ocean waves, right? You can sort of be laughing at a joke and then all of a sudden you're just weeping and it's just that up and down thing that is ... It does subside. It does subside, but as two of my brothers have lost children and as one of them said, it's just really a shitty way to live.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Yep. I'm sorry to hear that.

JOHN KENNEY:
I would say though, I would say, and I want to be very careful here because I don't want to put any sort of sheen on it, but there is, if you believe that for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction, then the death of someone as brutal as it is, and again, I want to be really careful with my language. It does open you up to seeing the world a little differently, and that can be in brutal ways, but it can also be about the fragility that we take for granted every moment, the fragility of it, the dumb arguments, the he said this, the, I'm cutting him out of my life, the whatever, right? The whatever. You see a little differently. You see behind the curtain that most of us aren't, that we don't want to see, but once you're there, you can't go back.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Right. So along those lines, there are a couple sentences in the book that say, "Maybe we're all obituary writers and our job is to write the best story we can right now." Do you think you've adopted that philosophy of living your life so your obituary ultimately reflects who you want to be?

JOHN KENNEY:
I ... forgive the pause, because again, I want to answer it honestly and the easy answer is, yes, I'm a changed man. It's funny because at the beginning of this process, I did try to write my own obituary and I was a journalism major in college and we had to write our own obituary, but I treated it as a joke. It is a tricky thing to ... And I know people who do this, who at the beginning, as a New Year's resolution, will write their obituary as if they were going to die that month, right? Had they visited Machu Picchu, had they called a long estranged friend. And I think it's a ... I love the idea of it. It's quite beautiful. It is quite a thing to start writing our own obituary with real intent, and all of a sudden you start putting down the names of your spouse and your children, and that can be very, very hard.
Yeah, I don't have a great answer for you on this one, Gail. I wish I did, and I don't mean to hem and haw. I'm someone who expects a lot of myself, and I'm not sure I have written the obituary I've quite wanted to write. That said, I'm trying like crazy to sort of fill the resume on the bucket list.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Well, that's the best we can do, right? And it depends on the day as well. We can't always be focusing on that, but it's a theme throughout our lives, thinking about what we want to do and the impact that we want to have on other people. So you haven't written your own obituary yet or you've dabbled with it?

JOHN KENNEY:
I've dabbled with it. You know what I'm going to do when I get off the phone? I'm going to write it and I'm going to send it to you.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Okay. Is it going to be like Bud's?

JOHN KENNEY:
Probably. And for those who've not read the book, and shame on you if you haven't, because he's had a little few too many scotches, makes up a far better life than the one that is his, claiming he's the Dalai Lama's twin brother and the inventor of Pringles, I think at one point. I've led a very quiet life. I've done a little traveling and the nature of my work is solitary. I sit in a small room and pretend to write and look out the window at the birds. I don't know that my obituary would be a very interesting 300 words, but we'll see.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Well, and speaking of obituaries, I heard you have a new book coming out, mainly because you told me. Tell us about that.

JOHN KENNEY:
Yeah. In I See You've Called In Dead, there's a very small detail about the main character whose mother died when he was 12. And her obituary was only 74 words long and this really bothered him because he wondered how the person he experienced was this full rich human and yet these 74 words did not do her justice. I borrowed that from my own life. My mother's obituary on page 37 of the Boston Globe was 74 words. Next to two obituaries of men that were 300, 400 words long. One a lawyer, one an editor. And I still have the little clip-out. And I'm writing a new novel, but this fall, this past fall, I went to the funeral of a 62-year-old woman, a friend of my wife's, who died suddenly in her sleep. And her four grown kids were there and it was a very, very difficult wake.

And I just got to thinking about it. And the new book is a slim memoir of my mother's life and this time around her death. And it's called 74 Words: A Son's Very Late Attempt to Rewrite His Mother's Obituary. And it's a laugh riot. I'm kidding. Although there are light parts in it, I'm just not someone who ... I think it's a really long day if you can't laugh.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Right.

JOHN KENNEY:
And it's funny because there's another one of my brothers passed away last year, right around now. It's almost one year to the day. Yeah. He was a gorgeous soul. My brother Michael, who was 73, he had a brain tumor, but lived with it for a year, 11 months of which I was convinced he was making it up for attention. He was fine. God bless. He was in no pain and surrounded by family. But he lived in Boston and I went up and back a whole bunch and got to spend a lot of amazing time with him. He was a big strapping Irishman, strong as a bull, worked with his hands. And his two passions in life were hockey and golf. And it was weird because a few months before the book came out, I wrote my brother's obituary. And it was very strange because his daughters asked me to do it.

And I said, "I don't really know how to do that. " And they're like, "You're writing a book about an obituary writer." I was like, "It's made up. I don't know what I'm doing." But it was a wonderful experience to get to do it and I was really honored to do it. But for your sort of listening audience, I hope they appreciate ... There was a sort of lovely moment. This is Boston and it was the winter and there's a lot of Boston Bruins fans up there, myself among them, and certainly my brother Michael. But on the day of the funeral, we were going to, after the previous night of the wake, we were going to gather at the funeral home, little mass and then off to the church, the funeral itself. And I arrived very early. So I wanted to spend time alone in the room with my brother.

And so I got there with a coffee on a bitterly cold morning and the back door was open. And I think the two funeral directors didn't know I was sitting there. It was gorgeous because I'm sitting there looking at my brother Mike, who's a huge Boston Bruins fan, and the Bruins had lost the night before in overtime by one goal. And the two funeral directors, guys I know, are talking about the Bruins, but they're being regular people. They're not funeral directors because they don't think anyone's in the house. And there's the occasional F-bomb and I'm laughing because if Mike could sit up from the coffin, he would go into the room and have the same conversation with them. And I thought, "This is perfect. This is perfect." And then they saw me and sort of reverted to ... And I was like, "Hey, hey, I saw the game. They shouldn't have lost." They started laughing. It was just a perfect funeral director moment.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
That's really lovely. I know.

JOHN KENNEY:
Yeah.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Those funeral directors, they're real people, right?

JOHN KENNEY:
They're real people. And I wouldn't last an hour in that job. I wouldn't last. What is required, the grace under pressure, daily dealing with people who are at some of the worst moments of their lives. I just, man, my hat is off. It really is. It's quite a thing. It's quite a thing to do.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Right. I completely agree. I've been in this space for about 14 years now and have learned so much about the important work that they do. Your book, I have one more question about the memoir of your mom. Since you were only 12 when she died, were there a lot of details that you needed to fill in? And did that give you an opportunity to talk to other relatives and friends and maybe learn things that you never knew about your mom?

JOHN KENNEY:
Yes. The short answer is yes. The slightly sadder answer is there's a 14-year age gap in my family between the oldest boy and the youngest, and I'm towards the back. So we have unfortunately buried a lot of relatives. And so my memory is like a shoebox of old family photos and 16-millimeter film. I have some very detailed memories and notes and photos, but there are gaps. I've filled in the ones I needed and sort of could with one remaining quite elderly aunt and a couple of cousins. There are still gaps.

And I say memoir. The story's about 11 months long. My mother had breast cancer, but this was 1974 and she ignored the lump in her breast for a long, long time. And by the time she finally did go into the hospital, it was too far gone to deal with. It was also a time, 1974, where chemotherapy was still a fairly new thing. I was lucky enough to reach out and talk with an oncologist, one of the most recognized oncologists in the country, who ironically knew my mother's surgeon, which there were 28,000 oncologists in the United States of America. I reached out to five. One got back to me. He knew my mother's doctor. 

That struck me as a bit of a sign from the other side, which I'll take. But it was a very, very different time than it is today, not to get into detail, but since the mapping of the human genome, cancer care, chemotherapy is based on your genetic composition. It gets into the cellular level, into the proteins and the structure of cancer cells. In 1974, the survival rate from breast cancer, I believe this number's correct. Forgive me if I'm off a few digits, but I think it was 43%. Today, the five year survival rate for breast cancer, I believe is 97%. So we're living at a radically different time, but to answer your question more fully, I was able to give context to the time in September of that year. So a bit of history, Richard Nixon resigned on August 9th, 1974. Vice President Gerald Ford took over. Within a month, the White House announced that his wife had breast cancer and that she was going to have a radical mastectomy. This was a different thing back then. People did not talk openly in newspapers about the breast of the (wife of the) President of the United States. Betty Ford deserves massive amounts of credit for fundamentally changing how we think about and talk about breast cancer, mammograms, breast checkups in this country. She had the courage to be out in front. It's likely the reason my mother ended up going to a doctor.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Wow.

JOHN KENNEY:
And so she was a remarkable woman. But yeah, I mean, I was able to fill in some gaps. Unfortunately, there's still a lot, and I must say, my 3:00 AM self kicks myself for not knowing more because once those people are gone from your life, those stories are gone with them.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Right.

JOHN KENNEY:
So yeah.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Well, this is going to be such a lovely tribute to your mom, and I really can't wait to read it. So I look forward to that. You've talked about a lot of the people in your life today who have died and what those losses have meant to you. Is there someone in particular you're remembering today?

JOHN KENNEY:
Yeah. I think like all of us, we're visited daily by those ... They fly in and they fly out. But it's funny, I mean, my mother is a major part of my everyday life and DNA, but I think today, as I sit here staring out the window at the snow on the deck, it's my dad who, he died just shy of his 90th birthday,

A guy you just couldn't kill, a diet of red meat and gravy and Lucky trikes, a few fingers of scotch. But this was a guy who he grew up in the Depression and enlisted at 17 and a half in the Navy and was in submarines for three and a half years in World War II and came back and was a firefighter and badly, badly injured on the fire department and somehow put food on the table for his family. I don't know how in our 1200-square-foot house after his broken back and he was given last rights and ...

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Wow.

JOHN KENNEY:
But he was a guy who was so much a better man than I am. And I think in my teens, I didn't realize just how ... We had a very good relationship, but sometimes you don't see your parents for who they are and I did and later in life, but he was a guy who never complained. Part of it was the sort of growing up in The Depression and you know, he never had a cup of coffee. He didn't say, geez, this is pretty good. That is kind of the secret to life. I started having kids late. I have a 13-year-old son, almost 14, and my son reminds me a lot of my dad. He's fascinated by the military. We were just down on winter break. We went to Annapolis where my dad's brother went and my son, he's now convinced he wants to go to the Naval Academy, which I would love, mostly for the cost.

But yeah, that was a long-winded way of saying my dad was a pretty damn badass guy.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Well, thank you for sharing a little bit about him and your brother and your mom. Thank you for being willing to be vulnerable and talk a little bit about that grief. It sounds like you've been surrounded by some pretty amazing people, so thank you for that.

JOHN KENNEY:
I've been very lucky. I've been very lucky to have people in my life who taught me a lot.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
That's wonderful. Thank you so much for joining me today, John. This has been such a great conversation. By the way, if you see a sudden spike in sales, I'm going to take personal credit for that because I have been recommending this book to pretty much everyone I know. And I guess now I'm sharing it with a whole bunch of people I don't know through this episode. Thank you so much.

JOHN KENNEY:
I say we split it, Gail, and go to Vegas and let it ride. Listen, thank you so much for the opportunity to chat. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
You are welcome. Thank you. And when you pick up a copy of I See You've Called In Dead, check out the QR code in the back cover where you can access bonus content like Q&A, a book club kit, even Obituary Mad Libs, which I really loved doing. And to learn more about Remembering A Life, visit RememberingALife.com.