I like to think of myself as a writer-editor on call. If a metaphor needs rewiring or a talking-point has lost its pointiness, I am on it like butter on toast. But when a friend asked me to write an obituary for her mother, I wondered if I was really the man for the job. I didn’t know her mother and I had never written an obituary before. But how could I say no?
Inside of a year, I found myself writing two more obituaries, one for a colleague who passed away, all too soon, in the middle of a business trip, and one for the father of the same friend whose mother had just died. These were all sad occasions, obviously, and I was glad to be of help in this modest way.
To my surprise, I took away from the experience much more than I gave.
Not least among the wonders of obituary-writing is the simple act of writing down the basic dates and facts of the life you’re describing: birth, education, marital status, family, jobs, retirement, or some combination thereof. Each time, without fail, this information, which we slot so thoughtlessly into the usual bureaucratic forms, began to swell before my eyes, reassuming its true significance and striking a mystic chord.
For the writer, this is very humbling, because you have done, really, nothing to make it happen. But there it is: a true story emerging almost effortlessly, with a beginning, middle, and end already supplied. If you have the facts in front of you, the right themes just seem to surface without your having to impose them. You’re not even a writer. You’re a secretary taking dictation.
But as you do your work, you thrill to the odd bits of experience that have become a part of the life and personal lore. My colleague Bill was a preppy, floppy-haired scholar-poet with a weakness for bowties and petite European sports cars. Postponing grad school in rhetoric, he apprenticed himself as a mechanic to work on Alfa Romeos. It was not how he left his mark on the world, but talking to his friends and colleagues, I noticed that few stories so quickly brought a smile to their lips.
John McIntyre, the distinguished copy editor of the Baltimore Sun, recently said that if you can write one obituary you can write a hundred of them, so stable is the formula. Perhaps he is right that any life can be described according to such conventions, but there is no reason mourners and obituarists can’t vary the formula by putting a greater emphasis on their favorite anecdotes. In fact, I think they should.
One story I heard about my friend’s mother concerned the time she first met her husband of 49 years. Because she wasn’t wearing her glasses that day, she had to ask her friends if he was at all good looking. Apparently, he was, so she agreed to a date. Still not sure of what she was getting into, she took a kitchen knife with her to the date, carrying it in her pocketbook.
Okay, this little gem about the knife didn’t make it into the official obituary. Then again, this woman left behind a number of excellent stories that more than covered the allotted 400 words. As a young woman, inspired by Amelia Earhart, she took flying lessons. Although very poor, she found a way to put herself through college and, after graduation, finagled a plane ticket to Europe for a backpack tour. After a successful scientific career, she retired and became a regular at the local library, where she was known as the Puzzle Lady, for her love of assembling jigsaw puzzles and her willingness to help anyone who wanted to work on one.
Her husband, too, left behind some great stories. My favorite, though, was a simple little thing about his playing golf the week he died. He had learned the game as a young caddy and maintained a passion for the sport his whole life. But the kicker was this: Just a few days before he died, he played with his much, much younger son-in-law, beating this poor fellow one last time by several strokes.
In old age, the cliché goes, no one wishes they had spent more time at the office. Still, it is interesting how many of the things we worked hardest at become a blur, while our quirks can actually achieve some measure of immortality, especially among those closest to us. All the better then, I say, if our obituaries document more of the funny details. For the record, I hereby authorize my survivors to do exactly that.
