As friends, relatives and colleagues filed into a memorial service for the Food Network host Anne Burrell in Manhattan on Friday afternoon, they noticed that somebody had placed on each chair a sheet of Billy Joel’s lyrics to “Only the Good Die Young.”
At the end of the event, they learned why. Ms. Burrell’s husband, Stuart Claxton, urged them to “give her a big send-off” in a karaoke-style singalong joined by Food Network executives and hosts including Scott Conant, Amanda Freitag, Marc Forgione and Geoffrey Zakarian.
“We’ve got one shot at this, so let’s make it count,” Mr. Claxton said as the opening lines flashed on two large screens on either side of the closed coffin in the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on the Upper East Side.
The city’s medical examiner has not yet determined a cause of death for Ms. Burrell, who was found unresponsive in the shower at her Brooklyn home on Tuesday morning. According to an internal document viewed by The New York Times, Ms. Burrell, who was 55, was “surrounded by approximately (100) assorted pills.” Emergency medical workers who responded to a 911 call pronounced her dead at the scene.
But any clouds of mystery were determinedly kept at bay during the service, which was a celebration of a woman who, by all accounts, rarely passed up an occasion to celebrate. She had spent the night before she died performing at an improv club in Brooklyn.
Her manager, Scott Feldman, recalled that Ms. Burrell invariably introduced him as “my dad” when he went out with her in the evenings.
“I was there to keep things on track,” Mr. Feldman said. “And Anne was there to do what she did.”
Mr. Claxton told the audience of more than 200 that Ms. Burrell had chosen a passage from the song to run under her senior photo in the 1987 yearbook of Cazenovia High School in upstate New York: “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than die with the saints; the sinners are much more fun.”
Before the chapel’s screens flashed those lyrics, they displayed snapshots of Ms. Burrell posing in bars, restaurants, television studios, by the ice at a Rangers game at Madison Square Garden. In every picture, she had the blondest hair and the widest grin.
“She would describe herself as a professional pleasure provider,” Mr. Claxton said. “She loved a good double entendre.”
At the front of the chapel were two half-mannequins. One wore a Rangers jersey. The other was dressed in a chef’s jacket with Ms. Burrell’s name embroidered next to the lapel and a red Sharpie clipped to the right sleeve. It was the kind of pen she used to draw lines on the hands of contestants on one of her shows, “Worst Cooks in America,” when they gripped their knives the wrong way.
Before the service began, a basket of red Sharpies was set out in the entrance hallway next to the memorial book, with a note encouraging anyone to take one “in honor of Anne.” As the visitors waited for their chance to write their names, Freddie Mercury’s voice came over the speakers.
“Tonight, I’m gonna have myself a real good time,” he sang. “Don’t stop me now.”
Pete Wells was the restaurant critic for The Times from 2012 until 2024. He was previously the editor of the Food section.
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