“Your identity is more interesting than your biography. […] Aren’t we also that moment—that nothing moment—on a cool spring day when, stopped by a lilac bush in bloom, […] we close our eyes and feel deeply, profoundly grateful, before it slips away, gone, and we’re back to the noise of our own head? Aren’t we that too?”

While drunkenly writing his own obituary, Bud reflects on the inadequacy of biographical facts to capture a person’s essence. A series of rhetorical questions and sensory imagery—the “lilac bush in bloom”—contrast factual “biography” with the experiential “identity.” This passage critiques the formulaic nature of obituaries and explores The Power of Storytelling to Define a Life, arguing for a more nuanced and emotional understanding of human experience.

“I remember Tuan’s first words to me: ‘The good news is that someone died today.’

I also remember I stared, not sure what to say. He shook his head. ‘You don’t understand yet.’”

This anecdote reveals the professional philosophy of Bud’s officemate, Tuan, which contrasts with Bud’s inexperience. Tuan’s seemingly cynical statement is framed as a piece of wisdom that Bud has yet to grasp—one that recognizes that their work provides constant, vital engagement with life and death. The line functions as foreshadowing, hinting at the perspective Bud will eventually need to adopt to find meaning in his work and his life.

“They [the nuns] practice something called memento mori. Latin for remember that you die. […] When they were asked if it was depressing, they said no, quite the opposite. They said it makes life so…almost impossibly beautiful.”

Speaking to Bud after the latter is called into human resources, Howard introduces the novel’s core philosophical concept. His definition of “memento mori” articulates the central argument that contemplating mortality is essential for appreciating life. Howard’s speech acts as a catalyst for Bud’s journey, reframing death as a source of beauty and meaning rather than a mere endpoint.

“And then to the Brooklyn Bridge, along the footpath that gradually rises above the roadway […] To have come here and thought, Perhaps I can make a go. To come to the realization that you didn’t, that your chances were running out, that time […] had sped up when you weren’t looking.”

Following his suspension, Bud’s walk home becomes a moment of midlife crisis. The act of walking on the bridge, a structure meant to connect and facilitate forward movement, ironically highlights Bud’s feelings of stagnation and failure—an early instance of bridges’ symbolic function depicting Bud’s difficulty with life transitions. The use of anaphora with the repetition of “To have come” and “To come” evokes Bud’s cumulative disappointment, crystallizing his sense of being trapped between his past hopes and present despair.

“I’m saying that if you haven’t lived the life you want, if you haven’t loved life, then at the end, I think a deep and very sad regret comes over you. But if you have, if you’ve lived well […] then just as true is the peace you feel.”

During their first significant conversation, Tim articulates the novel’s central philosophy, which serves as a counterpoint to Bud’s existential drift. His dialogue, structured around the contrast between a life of regret and a life of peace, establishes his role as a spiritual and ethical guide for Bud. This passage defines a meaningful life by its emotional richness, addressing the theme of The Search for Authentic Human Connection.

“It’s just…There’s something that happens. If you let it. If you’re open to it. It’s kind of…the secret to life.”

Spoken by Clara after Bud learns that she attends the wakes of strangers, this line introduces the motif of funerals. Her statement frames the act as a spiritual practice for achieving a more vital existence, while the use of ellipses suggests the insight she’s attempting to communicate must be experienced firsthand. Clara thus serves as a catalyst for Bud, offering him an unconventional path toward confronting his own stagnation.

“I looked up this quote last night, after we got back from the wake. A Frenchman named Montaigne. He said, ‘We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom.’”

Here, Tim’s intertextual reference to Montaigne links his and Bud’s planned project of attending funerals to the deliberate practice of memento mori. This quote defines the novel’s central argument: that freedom from fear (of living and dying) comes from actively contemplating mortality rather than avoiding it.

“A smart person once told me to sit with it. To stay in the pain.

[…]

Because it’s the only way to make it go away.”

In this moment of direct confrontation, Tim gets to the root of Bud’s troubles. The advice to “stay in the pain” challenges Bud’s habit of avoidance through humor and intellectual detachment, which has defined his life since his divorce, if not his mother’s death. This dialogue serves as a turning point, foreshadowing the emotional work that Bud will undertake to heal.

“She ran and I followed. She screamed when she hit the water. I screamed louder. It was worse than she had described. It felt as if electricity were hitting my body, the pain ferocious.”

Kenney uses tactile imagery and metaphor to describe Bud and Clara’s plunge into the cold ocean. This physical shock symbolizes Bud’s emotional reawakening, a painful but necessary jolt out of his numbness, and echoes the broader idea that engaging directly with pain, mortality, etc., sharpens one’s appreciation of life. The shared, extreme experience also helps forge a bond of vulnerability with Clara, advancing the theme of the search for authentic human connection.

“My obituary for him was more of a brief biography, dates and events, rather than any nuance about our father’s life. I found my father’s obituary one of the harder ones I’ve ever had to write but not for the obvious reasons.”

In this reflection, Bud reveals his struggle to connect emotionally with his own father. This passage establishes a baseline for his character’s growth, demonstrating how his detachment has previously prevented him from honoring life through the act of storytelling. At the same time, the flashback that follows reveals that Bud’s detachment was partly a response to his father’s own emotional withdrawal after his wife’s (Bud’s mother’s) death. In this, Bud’s father serves as a cautionary tale, as he spent his later years chasing superficial relationships with women, leaving Bud with little to say in his obituary beyond noting his professional achievements.

“We can’t fire you because you’re dead. According to the system. The company’s system. You’re dead.”

Delivered by his HR representative, this line literalizes (and satirizes) Bud’s existential crisis. The absurd situation, born from a drunken mistake, becomes a symbol for Bud’s state of “limbo”—neither fully engaged nor officially ended. While the novel upholds the value of Bud’s writing, it critiques the corporate environment in which he does that work, implicitly connecting it to Bud’s state of living death. Here, the quote uses situational irony to challenge dehumanizing systems where an employee’s data profile is more important than their physical existence.

“I didn’t know I was going to say it out loud but I said, ‘I keep dying. In my dreams.’”

In a moment of vulnerability, Bud reveals his recurring nightmares to his coworker Tuan, revealing the deep-seated anxiety that exists beneath his apparent apathy. This further suggests that his professional crisis stems from a subconscious, personal terror of death.

“They played and we sat in silence as the music, composed three hundred years ago, was made new again, here, in this living room, among this small band of friends, reaching out across time, a distant past, fully alive now.”

This description frames a gathering at one of Tim’s salons as a moment of shared experience, illustrating the theme of the search for authentic human connection. By emphasizing how the centuries-old music is “made new,” the author suggests that art and community have the power to transcend time, creating meaning and vitality in the present.

“Surely our days are measured in small things, small connections, small thoughts. […] Night, Mom. See you tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. We have time. Of course we have time. Please dear God.”

As Bud contemplates the sudden deaths of Molly and Eddie Donnelly, his internal monologue shifts into a stream of consciousness, imagining the mother’s final moments. The narrative technique blurs the line between Bud’s perspective and Molly’s, suggesting an empathetic connection that pierces his usual detachment. The desperate repetition of “we have time” underscores the novel’s central argument that confronting mortality is essential to valuing the seemingly mundane rituals of everyday life. The allusion to Macbeth (1623) underscores this by recontextualizing a line from Macbeth’s famous monologue on life’s meaninglessness; here, “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” refers not to a dreary succession of empty days but to the mistaken belief that there is time to spare, which makes the time that does exist all the more meaningful.

“‘The story forms,’ she continued. ‘The women leave. You’re to blame. […] What was once merely a thought, a fleeting, fact-less notion, is now a bedrock truth.’“

This quote, from a flashback to a therapy session, provides a diagnosis of Bud’s emotional crisis. The therapist’s words reflect the theme of the power of storytelling to define a life, explaining how Bud has internalized a self-defeating narrative that has hardened into an unchangeable reality. This explains the origin of Bud’s fear of connection and his inability to escape his past.

“But this whole thing…It isn’t about death. It’s about the privilege of being alive. How do you not get that at this point in your life? And fuck off too.”

Tim delivers this blunt rebuke to Bud after Bud emotionally withdraws during a funeral for a woman roughly the same age as his mother was when she died. The line continues to underscore that the act of attending strangers’ funerals is in truth an exercise in appreciating life. The juxtaposition of this insight with a curse gives the dialogue a raw tone, forcing Bud to confront the true purpose of his journey.

“The point is that my mother’s obituary was only seventy-four words long. I counted. […] I didn’t understand how her life could be reduced to seventy-four words.”

In a flashback detailing his mother’s death, Bud identifies the origin of his career choice and his obsession with memorializing lives. The 74-word obituary becomes a symbol of the failure of language to capture a human essence, fueling Bud’s lifelong quest to find a more just form of remembrance. This moment links the personal trauma of his mother’s death to the narrative’s professional and thematic concerns, implying that Bud is in some sense failing his mother’s memory in his recent disengagement from work and life.

“[The butterflies] kept doing it, even after the mountain was gone, because that’s what they knew.”

Clara tells Bud a story about monarch butterflies that continue to fly around a long-vanished mountain, creating a metaphor for his psychological state. The “mountain” represents past trauma—his mother’s death, his divorce—while the butterflies’ flight path symbolizes the self-limiting emotional patterns he continues to follow out of habit. This illustrates the novel’s argument that healing requires consciously breaking from established narratives to forge a new path.

“‘I’m afraid,’ I said.

‘Of what?’

‘Dying. Because I’m not sure I’ve ever really lived. And I don’t know how.’”

Discussing his recurring nightmares, Bud confides in Tim regarding his central internal conflict. The simple dialogue reveals that his ennui is rooted in fear not of death itself, but of an unlived life. Acknowledging this is a crucial step in his character arc, moving his struggle from a subconscious state to a conscious one and emphasizing the theme of confronting mortality to gain an appreciation of life.

“We should be required to take flight from time to time, to see anew, to see how small and fragile we are.”

During a helicopter ride over Manhattan, Bud reflects on the city from a new physical and metaphorical vantage point. The flight facilitates a shift in perspective, reducing the overwhelming complexities of life to a manageable, interconnected whole. In this moment of epiphany, he suggests that distance is sometimes necessary to appreciate both the grandeur of the world and the delicate nature of human existence within it; the flight thus becomes another form of memento mori.

“Whole worlds of what ifs. […] It’s the broken washing machine in your apartment building, forcing you to lug your duffel bag of soiled linens five blocks, the strap of the bag breaking, the frustration causing you to burst into tears and a man named Michael stopping to ask if you are okay, Michael with the kind face who offers you Kleenex and who, in two years’ time, will be the father of your two beautiful children. Lives are changed by seemingly unconnected, random decisions that change everything. So it is also the detour to get a few slices of pizza and two bottles of root beer so we could eat lunch. Which is why I wasn’t in the room when Tim died.”

This passage reflects on the arbitrary nature of tragedy. The narrative voice steps back from the scene to muse at length on the nature of coincidence and contingency, highlighting the tension between human intention and the uncontrollable randomness of fate. The examples Bud highlights all work out for the best, which heightens the abrupt tonal shift as his narration shifts back into a personal register to connect Bud’s mundane choice—getting pizza—to a life-altering consequence. Bud’s recognition of this underscores the novel’s overarching point about life’s preciousness.

“‘There are three people in the room when I work. There’s me. There’s the deceased. And there’s God.’ He shrugged, his enigmatic expression never changing. […]

‘They all matter to me,’ he added. ‘How could they not?’”

While Bud helps prepare Tim’s body, the funeral director, Aldo, explains his professional philosophy, framing the work of mortuary science as a sacred act of witness. His words reinforce the developing framework for Bud’s own work; Aldo emphasizes that every life deserves reverence and care, which is central to the theme of the power of storytelling to define a life.

“Tim was, in his own way, trying to show me something. Teach me something. Here’s what I learned. Nothing.

[…]

And then Tim died. And death entered my soul. I think the question is, what do I do with that?”

Bud’s eulogy for Tim subverts the expectation that the narrative has set up: that Bud found wisdom in reflecting on the deaths of strangers. As it turns out, this is not precisely true, but it speaks to the seismic impact that Tim’s death has had on Bud—an impact that retroactively imbues all those other deaths with a different meaning. The rhetorical move thus highlights his subsequent suggestion that the intellectual understanding of mortality is meaningless until it becomes a visceral, personal loss. The passage marks the culmination of the funeral motif, demonstrating that true transformation comes from the profound pain of authentic connection and grief.