Art Buchwald dies after a long goodbye

WASHINGTON — Art Buchwald, the Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist, made a career out of skewering Washington's elite, then won even wider fame when he chose to let himself die rather than fight for every ounce of life. Now he's had the last laugh.

Buchwald died of kidney failure at home Wednesday, surrounded by family, nearly a year after he stunned them by rejecting medical treatments aimed at keeping him alive. As it turned out, he lived another year instead of the mere weeks he was given by doctors. He was 81 when he died.

The political satirist went out with a twist:

"Hi, I'm Art Buchwald and I just died," he announced with a grin, in a video posted on The New York Times Web site. Buchwald recorded the video interview last summer, to be shown after his death.

Buchwald said his months of dying were the time of his life. Neither he nor his doctors could explain why he kept living so long after he checked into a hospice last February, certain at the time that the end was near. "I have to thank my kidneys," he told The Associated Press last year.

So, as he did during a half-century career that touched two continents, Buchwald decided to make the most of every last minute.

He held court daily in the parlor of his hospice room as friends streamed in to say goodbye. He resumed his twice-weekly column. When it came time to leave the hospice, he spent the summer at his home on Martha's Vineyard, Mass. He wrote "Too Soon to Say Goodbye," a book about the experience, and worked book parties in Washington and New York from his wheelchair.

"He's one of the few people I know who was able to write a script for his death," Jack Valenti, former chairman and chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America, told AP on Thursday.

Buchwald said the decision to forgo dialysis and let himself die was liberating. "When you make your choice, then a lot of the stress is gone. Everything is great because you accept that you are the one who made the choice."

But when death didn't come, he opined in a column that he had to scrap his funeral plans, rewrite his living will, buy a new cell phone and get on with his improbable life.

Carly Simon, who had been tapped to sing at his funeral, agreed to sing for him while he was still alive. She wrote a song for him that bears the same name as his book about dying, "Too Soon to Say Goodbye," and sang it to him last summer on the Vineyard.