Jim Henson’s Final Lesson: It’s a Good Life, Enjoy It
In May of 1990, a fifty-three-year-old man named Jim Henson walked into a hospital in New York City complaining of feeling unwell.
He had been performing the day before. He had done a press tour. He had been working on his next television project.
He was as busy as he had been at any point in his life.
He had a strep infection that had spread quickly. By the time he was admitted, his organs were already failing.
Within twenty hours, he was gone.
The man who had given the world Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Big Bird, Fozzie Bear, Oscar the Grouch, and the Cookie Monster passed away on May 16, 1990.
He left behind five children. A wife he was separated from but had never legally divorced. A company. A whole television empire.
A planet of children and adults who had grown up watching the Muppets.
Five days later, on May 21, 1990, his memorial service was held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan.
Jim Henson had left specific instructions years before. They had been written down in 1986.
He had told his family in a letter exactly how he wanted to be remembered.
He had asked that nobody wear black. He had asked that there be a jazz band.
So on a spring morning in New York, thousands of people walked into one of the largest cathedrals in America wearing bright colors.
A Dixieland brass band played as they entered. The flowers were every color except mourning.
Every member of the congregation was handed a brightly painted foam butterfly attached to a puppet performer’s rod. So that during certain songs, they could wave them in the air together.
His son Brian read aloud from the letter Jim had written to his children four years earlier.
The letter was simple. It opened with the line: “First of all, don’t feel bad that I’m gone.”
He wrote about how he hoped to be there waiting for them when their own time came. He wrote about how life was meant to be fun and joyous and fulfilling.
He wrote about how silly it all might sound, but, as he put it, “What the hell, I’m gone, and who can argue with me?”
He ended with a sentence that has been quoted in tributes ever since.
“Please watch out for each other and love and forgive everybody. It’s a good life, enjoy it.”
The Muppet performers, who had spent decades hiding underneath puppets, came onto the stage holding their characters.
They gathered together, all of them, and they sang a song called “Just One Person” together.
Then Caroll Spinney, the man who had been inside Big Bird for twenty-one years, walked onto the altar of the cathedral as Big Bird himself.
He was crying inside the costume. The audience could not see his tears.
He sang Kermit’s signature song. “Bein’ Green.”
He could barely get through it. He paused at the end in front of the altar and looked up at the cathedral ceiling.
“Thank you, Kermit,” he said.
Then he walked off the stage.
There was not a dry eye in the cathedral.
Jim Henson had never wanted any of it to be sad.
He had spent his whole life trying to give the world something gentler than what it usually offered.
He had built his career on the radical idea that puppets could teach children kindness. That a green frog with a banjo could remind millions of grown adults what it had felt like to be small and hopeful.
That silly was sacred. That joy was a serious matter.
His instructions for his own funeral were the final lesson he had to teach.
Don’t wear black. Bring a band. Let the Muppets sing. Tell the children he loved them.
Tell the world to take care of each other. Tell them it is a good life. Tell them to enjoy it.
He had given the world the Muppets.
But the most beautiful gift he ever gave us, he gave us only after he was gone.
He gave us a model for how to leave.
With color. With music. With laughter. With love.
And with one final, perfect sentence.
It’s a good life. Enjoy it.
For those who have attended funerals that felt like obligations rather than celebrations, who have wondered how to honor someone without drowning in the weight of their absenceâthis story might feel like permission to grieve differently.
Which goodbyes in your own life taught you that remembering someone’s joy matters more than performing your sadness?
