So he went home and re-launched his legendary Washington Post column and wrote a book about almost dying called "Too Soon to Say Goodbye."
As the Washington Post has said, "For most people, dying is a milestone. For Buchwald, it was fresh material."
Buchwald finally succumbed to kidney failure last week on January 17th. A few minutes after his death, The New York Times launched this video that begins, "Hi, I'm Art Buchwald, and I just died."
The whole video is worth watching. But as for the big questions in life, Buchwald says the biggest question of all is not "Where are you are going?" Instead, it's "What are we doing here in the first place?"
At the end of his life he still wasn't sure of the answer to that question. But his best guess was that he was put on this earth to make people laugh. "If you can make people laugh, you get all the love you want."
His biggest regret? He never made Richard Nixon's enemy list. And he tried. Hard.
Life is insane. We get old. Our health suffers. It's tragic and full of unknowns. There are no guarantees. But life is also fascinating, a great adventure, hysterically funny, unspeakably beautiful and an incredible privilege.
I don't know exactly what I'm supposed to be doing here on earth. But whatever it is, I want to do it with the same joie de vivre as Art Buchwald.
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