Life Story Told

There is something about which I have been upset for some time. It seems in my mind to be a very reasonable complaint on my part, and yet I appreciate that it will probably appear rather insensitive. It has to do with my habit of reading the newspaper alongside my father each time I return home for the holidays. As I believe I've noted in the past, he continues to receive home delivery of the print edition, and undoubtedly will as long as they continue to make it. Each morning that I am there, I read the paper with him, making sure not to step on his toes so to speak. You must understand that newspaper lovers can't abide the disruption of their yet-to-be-read sections and their discards, so you have to proceed carefully. It's a rewarding experience, but one which requires some effort and deference.

My grievance is coming, so don't worry. One section I enjoy is the obituaries. I don't read them all. The thing that interests me is how each one expresses the sole salient fact common to them all: the death of the person in question. Most of them put it in precisely the same way. The favored expression is that the person has 'passed on'. The next leading phrase is that the person has gone to be with the Lord, or some such variation on the same essential thought. A very distant third is the bare statement that the person has died. In truth, I don't begrudge anyone the choice of how to say what has become of them. I only know what I will opt for, and that is to say that I have died.

There are two good reasons for this. A very practical one is that they don't give those obituaries away for free. Indeed, the newspaper probably is leaning on them harder than ever in the absence of the classified ads which have largely fled for the internet. I believe in being concise, although that may be belied by my expansive writing here. I will do my best to see that my survivors carry that out by expressing the key points of the event in the fewest words they can manage, as I see no good reason to expend any more of my bequeathment on that than is necessary.

The second reason is more personal and harder to explain. It will surely be unpalatable to many. I don't think that I would want grand, flowery language which trumpets what are for me mainly private beliefs. I will not be there to read what is written on my behalf, but if I were and the result was an ostentatious expression of my religious principles, I would fear appearing very smug about my own immortal fate and judgmental about those of others. Those who know me will know well enough about all that without reading it in the paper. Give me a spare and humble obituary. Not very soon naturally, but in a good long time, that's what I'll want.