For the rest of my life I'll probably find stuff—quotes, wisdom—that I wish I could've included in my brother's eulogy. Example: I began re-reading John Irving's “The World According to Garp,” a copy of which had been on my brother's bedside table, when I returned from Minneapolis on Dec. 1. But I didn't finish it until earlier this week. I found something there.

My nephew Casey, my brother's son, who wound up with my brother's copy of the book, included a passage from “Garp” in his eulogy, so it would've been nice to piggyback on that. The passage I'm thinking of comes from the last page of the novel. It's part of the comparison between medicine and art, between Garp's mom, Jenny Fields, a nurse who divided WWII-era patients into Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees and Goners, and Garp, the novelist, and it leads to the book's famous last line: “But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.” In the world according to Irving, too. He lets us know how all the characters in the novel die. No one gets off. 

The passage is a parenthetical. Maybe it was mentioned earlier? It's something Garp tells a young admirer named Whitcomb, who becomes Garp's biographer. He's telling him what a novelist's job is:

... trying to keep everyone alive, forever. Even the ones who must die in the end. They're the most important to keep alive.

That's what we were trying to do with our eulogies and remembrances on Dec. 27. That we were doomed to fail makes the effort all the more necessary.