The Chronicles of Life and Death

I've decided I kind of like writing obituaries.

It sounds like an awful thing to do, and usually I procrastinate doing it as long as possible. I'm assigned to do one obituary every other week. I sift through the paid obituaries, and look for somebody for our coverage area.

It seems kind of odd to look for somebody who's life was interesting enough to "merit" doing a staff-written obituary.

Then I have to call up some family members, usually a spouse or a child. I have to give them the traditional talk "Hi, I read your father/brother/wife's obituary in the newspaper, they sounded like a really interesting person. Do you have some time to talk?" Obviously I say more than that. Usually, people are really receptive to the idea.

You'd think they would hang up on you right away, or call you an idiot. But most people are really dying (pun intended) to talk about their loved one, and an obituary in the newspaper is essentially a final account of somebody's life that the public sees. And ironically, obituaries are often much more about people's lives than their deaths.

So, to interview someone for an obituary you usually just need to ask one question. "Can you tell me a little about their personality?" you ask, and then you listen to them talk for 45 minutes. It's as if you can hear the person going through the grieving process over the phone. You hear them talk about everything they admired about whoever died. You hear stories of crazy stuff they did - like an 80-year-old grandpa jumping out of a tree in the back yard or a house wife that liked to play pranks on her neighbors.

I talked to a man once whose wife had just died of cancer. She knew she was going to die, so they had set up a bed on the main floor of her house so she could die at home. For Christmas, a group from her church decided they were going to go caroling at Joyce's house. More than 100 people volunteered to go, so the group had to sing to her from the backyard. Joyce had to stay in her bed, and it was facing away from the window. So her husband and children grabbed a really large mirror and held it up for her, so she could watch the refelction of the 100 carolers while she stayed in bed.

So here's the slightly morbid part about writing obituaries. It's almost as if listening to these people grieve over the phone helps me deal with some pent up grief of my own. I can listen to these other people talk about how their lives are never going to be the same and I don't feel so alone in all of it. It's like I'm getting some sort of twisted therapy from these people I just randomly decided to call up on the phone.