I’ve been a fan of the news for many years, and recently began to delve into it more, and I’m now intrigued by the whole concept of the obituary. Not just in terms of the content, but to what it means to those making the decision to put their life on the page. I’m not even sure I can put a label on it, but there are so many ways to interpret it as an obituary.
For example, if you put the word “death” in front of the word “obituary” (as it’s used here, in the UK), you can get an obituary which can look like this: I am deceased at the age of 20. I was born in the U.S. to parents who were both born in Canada. I was raised in a small town of roughly 9,000 people in the Midwest.
What a waste of time. If you were to put a label on this obituary, you would have to have some sort of name. The obituary is a joke, and you would have to be a little more careful about putting a label on it.
The story is that if you ask someone who isn’t dead, they will usually just say they are. That is, if you are asked by someone who isn’t dead, they will claim they’re dead (in fact, in general, they will claim they are dead) and tell you they are. For example, an obituary I had read about said that if you asked your mother if she was killed in a car accident, she would say yes.
If you don’t ask someone who isnt dead when you meet them at a funeral, they have the right to claim they are dead, even if they are not. A man in my town told me that he was told his wife was killed in a car accident, and that was the first time he understood that there was no such thing as a “normal” way to die. I asked him what he meant by that and he said it was “just” a different way to die.
I think this is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. The concept of death not being a normal way to die, but something I’ve only heard of in stories is completely bizarre. And its not like the man who told me this is a guy I’ve ever met. It is the wife who was supposed to be cremated in a funeral home. And she died in a car accident, not a funeral home.
It seems to me like a lot of people who are not like that probably don’t go to a funeral home because the family doesn’t know what they’re being considered to be.
I just can’t believe that anyone would actually do something stupid for a living. Even if you arent technically dead, you are still dead. You are definitely dead. And if you are really dead, you are definitely dead.
Exactly.
I agree with this entire post, but the way it came across I had to re-write it a bit. I didnt even think to re-write the obituary since it was so perfect. So now I am a bit of a hypocrite.
