Life & Mortality Quote by Art Buchwald

Buchwald turns terminal illness into a deadpan status update, and that tonal mismatch is the whole point. In a hospice, the script is supposed to be hushed, reverent, pre-grieved. He barges in with a nickname worthy of a barstool legend - "The Man Who Wouldn't Die" - and suddenly the institution built to manage endings looks almost bureaucratic, even a little superstitious. The joke is not that death is funny; it's that our systems for dealing with death are so fragile they can be punctured by one stubborn body refusing to follow the schedule.

The line "So far things are going my way" frames survival as a strategy game, a wager he's temporarily winning. It's gallows humor with an edge of self-awareness: he admits he doesn't know if the legend is "true", then immediately reports that people are "starting to wonder". That last clause is doing real work. It's not the medical staff's doubt about biology so much as the social discomfort of uncertainty. Hospice culture depends on predictability - on the quiet agreement that everyone knows what's coming and when. A patient who lingers breaks the emotional choreography: families can't finish grieving, staff can't close the narrative, and the room fills with a low-grade anxiety that feels, absurdly, like suspicion.

Context matters: Buchwald was a career satirist who made power and pretense his material, and late in life he famously wrote dispatches from hospice while still very much alive. He keeps authorship over his own ending by turning it into copy, turning fear into a punchline, and turning the institution's solemnity into a stage where the only rebellion left is persistence.