“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” by Amy Hempel is a heartbreaking story that deals with guilt and grief and loss. This was the first story we’ve read that made me cry.
We never learn the main character’s name; to us, she is the “Best Friend” of her dying friend, who is also not named. She visits her friend in the hospital as she is losing the battle with what is implied to be cancer, and keeps her company by telling her interesting and sometimes gruesome trivia and stories about death and natural disasters. The Best Friend seems both fascinated with and repulsed by death. Again and again, she tells stories about impending doom and unpredictable deaths, foreshadowing her friend’s fate and her own emotional devastation. Watching movies with her friend one night, though her friend is alive in the bed next to her, she says,
“I missed her already.”
The Best Friend seems to know that she can’t be there to see her friend die. When her friend’s health starts to decline, she tells her friend that she has to go home. She knows she’s abandoning her friend when she needs support the most, but that doesn’t stop her from leaving. It only makes her feel guilty and happy that she can go out and feel alive while her friend lays dying in the hospital:
“‘I have to go home,’ I said when she woke up. She thought I meant home to her house in the canyon, and I had to say No, home home. I twisted my hands in the time-honored fashion of people in pain. I was supposed to offer something. The Best Friend. I could not even offer to come back. I felt weak and small and failed. Also exhilarated.”
Her friend never expressed any fear of her impending death. The Best Friend said that “she was afraid of nothing, not even flying.” On the day her friend is buried, the Best Friend signs up for a Fear of Flying class and tells the instructor that her greatest fear is that, at the end of the class, she’ll still be afraid. This loops back poetically to one of the first little stories the Best Friend tells about death, where she explains why she didn’t visit her friend sooner. The story goes that a man lost his arm in a car accident and died, but what killed him was the fear he felt just looking at his injury, not the injury itself. The Best Friend is the same with her dying friend: she fears that she will never get over the loss of someone so dear. She avoided visiting her friend, and, at the end, didn’t even go to her funeral for the fear of the feelings she knows she’d be forced to deal with.
The Best Friend is a complex character, as her actions can be seen as both selfish and self-preserving. She wasn’t there for her friend, but in a sense, she couldn’t be due to her own mental state. She doesn’t deal with the trauma of losing her friend, and clings to trivia as a way to not think about what happened. In a heartbreaking scene, she refers to the cemetery where her friend is put to rest as simply “the one where Al Jolson is buried.”