What will Salinger’s tombstone say?

The paperback was legendary in my home.
The plain maroon jacket with the gold lettering “The Catcher in the Rye” accompanied only by the author’s name a few spaces below: J.D. Salinger.
The copy was purchased by my old man in the 1960s and then passed on to my older brother. By the time it came to me when I was thirteen, the cardboard cover was hanging by a little bit of glue.
After I read it for the third time in three years, the cover was completely off. I eventually bought a new edition. I was also entranced by his other works: “Nine Stories,” “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Franny and Zooey.” If you caught me around 1998, when I was 21 years old, and asked me who my favorite writer was, I’d probably say old Jerome David Salinger.
The notoriously reclusive Salinger died last Wednesday at the age of 91. Much will be said about how he stopped publishing and disappeared from the public spotlight, a sacrilegious act in the Age of Celebrity. The vanishing act was Salinger flipping the bird to our entire berserk culture for decades, which is commendable.
It’s the same renegade spirit Holden Caulfield, the teenaged protagonist of “Catcher,” possesses as he lashes out against all those he calls “phonies.”
What would Holden think about our 21st Century lives?
The lofty literary and cultural notions Salinger’s death brings up are great, but the first thing I thought of after hearing about it was whether Salinger’s epitaph would be similar to the one Holden imagines for himself in “Catcher.”
In high school, my brother, Chris, and I both had the same iconoclastic English teacher, though six years apart. She had lived in Paris and quoted Shakespeare with a hoarse, raspy voice. In between classes, she’d smoke long, brown European cigarettes right there in the room, out the window.
I won’t name her, in case she still teaches somewhere and has this habit.
Chris’s class got to pick the book for their report. He chose “Catcher in the Rye.”
For the project, each student had to get up in front of the class and answer very basic questions posed by the raspy-voiced teacher. Where does the story take place? In what year? Those types of things.
“What does Holden want written on his tombstone?” the teacher asked my brother.
“Uh,” my brother said. He blushed.
“Go on. Say it,” she said, urging him on.
When Chris said what he said, I’m sure the class erupted in hoots and hollers.
You see, what Holden imagines on his tombstone is unprintable in this paper. It includes the king daddy of all curse words and is more or less represented in our culture by the middle finger.
Holden says it like this: “That's the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write ‘[unprintable cuss]’ right under your nose. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say ‘Holden Caulfield’ on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say ‘[unprintable cuss].’ I'm positive.”
I know it’s an epigraph a surly teen would come up with, but when we lose our own Holden-ness, when we all start to try to fit in with the “phony” world and toe the line, then something more will have passed from the earth than Salinger.
Because when we stop questioning and occasionally rebelling against the powers that be, our own tombstones won’t be worth writing on.