U.P. Reader -- Volume #5

Your Obit

by Barbara Bartel

I wrote your obituary today. I'll read it to you later. Other than that, my morning was uneventful. Did you know there's an actual formula to writing an obituary? I'd never noticed before reading a handful in the newspaper so I'd know what to write in yours. I think most people only read the entire obit of relatives and friends. Otherwise they read the name, date of birth (to know the real age of the deceased), check for the cause of death to make sure it's nothing they personally are afflicted with, then scan down to the time of the services. That's what I usually do. Who cares if someone was a member of the Daughters of Isabella, taught piano, or loved to knit? What people want to know is which brothers and sisters are still alive, who they married, where they live now and what funeral home or church to send flowers or cards. Most folks know where to bring a casserole.

You'll have to pick a photo to run beside your obit. Please don't defer this chore to me. Just don't choose your graduation picture. Remember your mom insisted on giving you a Toni's Home Permanent with those tight pink hair curlers the night before? I shouldn't laugh but all the girls in our class thought it was so bold of you to wear a hat for your photo shoot. They called you a Feminist. A woman's libber. A rebel. Here your blond natural waves had been fried to brittle clumps. You smelled like ammonia for weeks! I hope you pick a photo of you now or very recent. One that captures the crow's feet and laugh lines you earned.

Oh, in the opening line I wasn't sure how to handle the God issue. I know you spent most of your adult life searching for meaning and with your scientific mind set could not "believe" as they say. All the redundant phrases like "meet her savior", "joined the Lord" or "went home to Jesus" would be insulting to your intellect. I don't like the fragment "passed away". That sounds so trivial. Cars pass. Clouds pass. Gas passes. Also, it implies you went some place. We'd had the 'where do you go when you die' conversation throughout our life together. There was never a conclusion we agreed upon.

So I made a list of ways to describe your, uh, exit, departure, expiration, but none of them fit. I decided to not sugarcoat the fact. I wrote that you died, plain and simple. I can add the date later, when I know. I didn't include your middle name; you hated the aunt you were named after, how when you were little she made you wash your hands before you could play her piano, an upright, for crying out loud.

Knowing how you feel about your father, I left him out of the second paragraph. Wrote you were the daughter of Genevieve Starling, life-long resident of Summit County. Why mention the asshole that molested you as a child and screwed up your entire life? Thank goodness you won't have to be buried next to him.

You're going to have to tell me if you want both your brothers listed. I know that the oldest one is only a half-brother (of a different mother, as the kids say today) but he was always the nicest to you, right? He helped you move several times; you kept in touch over the years. I'm not including Davy. Let him rot. Any brother who steals his sister's car to use when he robs a gas station should automatically not be included in anyone's obit. I figure your mom is going to read this and why cause her more heartache. She'll be dealing with your death and shouldn't have to be reminded that her bad blood son is still in the state pen. Mentioned your sister since she is respectable but I only listed her most current husband.

If people want to know the entire list of husbands they can look them up at the courthouse. Who cares anyway? Some of those guys she married were very good men. We all know she is a nut case. But I put her in because you guys always had a way of forgiving each other and letting go of the past. I listed her kids with all their last names, too. Her kids are her best work, don't you think? They haven't hounded us for any of your tools or other possessions like some of the other insensitive family vultures.

There are too many uncles, aunts, and cousins to list and they know who they are. They don't need their names in the newspaper. Some of them may appreciate not being listed. I am sure Donny wouldn't want any bill collectors to know he's still around. After the family paragraph comes the education and adult life part.

If you read other people's obits they write where they went to high school, college; some people mention places of employment. This one stumped me. Do I really list all the jobs you had? Would you want the world to know you ran away with a draft dodging trucker your first year in college and ended up in that "art" film? Or how you spent that year backpacking in Europe as a "translator"? I really didn't know where the adult part of your life started.

When we first met and hid our relationship from our parents or when years later we started living together as roommates? As I reviewed the decades it became harder and harder to put importance on the roller-coaster ride of life together. Mostly we just got by, lived from check to check, scrambling to take a short vacation here and there, with and without the kids. How can I ever put all those years into a couple lines that would make sense to anybody but us? Who else would understand how exciting it was for us to open the front door to that shack bungalow we bought for back taxes from that alcoholic book salesman? Or what it was like to stand in the snowbank outside freezing, our teeth chattering, while watching the place go up in smoke two years later after that pretend-to-be electrician left a live wire exposed in the fuse box on the kitchen wall? Remember the good job you got with that non-profit outfit run by the lusty butch Mennonites who kept asking you to lunch? Who would understand how hard it was living in a lower duplex in the inner city when we couldn't let the kids off the porch? Little Ruthie still talks about those days. She wasn't five when we got out of there but she remembers gunshots down the block at the Seven Eleven. No one would believe all we'd survived in those early days. I left it all out. Each thing I thought of just flooded more and more pictures into my mind. I couldn't select any one to represent you. None of them are who you are today, now. But each one made you who you are, now. That's the truth.

After the education and job section comes where people list the person's hobbies and organizations they belonged to. Like if you've been a 4-H leader for eighteen years or a church lady, you'd mention it. What does it matter? If you taught the blind to see, hey, go for it, write it down. Most of us normal folks don't have anything unique or exceptional is how I see it. If you didn't cure cancer or write a bestseller, I can't see including anything. Who cares if you collected salt and pepper shakers to sell on eBay? I can guarantee you that the only person interested in your salt and pepper shakers is the burglar reading the obits to see when your house will be vacant during the funeral services so he can help himself to your collection.

I got to thinking about what I will remember forever about you, not that you were born under the sign of Leo, or that you had the thickest, straight natural blond hair in the world, but that you were extremely generous. I'm going to mention how you spent one whole summer of your junior year painting a barn for old lady Courson. Some senior center program hired teenagers to work for old people for three months. You never missed a day out on a rickety scaffold getting the worst sunburn of your life. When you got paid in mid-August (your mom expected you to buy school clothes and you'd at first wanted to buy that beat up green Firebird at Loco Motors) but you surprised everyone by going over to the courthouse and paying the back taxes on Courson's farm so that the old lady wouldn't have to go into a nursing home.

Also, I'm going to remember what courage you had. Exceptional courage. Like when you were driving to work, taking Fond du Lac Avenue through the dicey part of the north side, passed the chained up liquor stores, boarded store front churches, and dilapidated grocery stores tied up with wrought iron gates, remember that? Friends would tell you a hundred times to not go down Fond du Lac. At a red light, a skinny woman came running into the street hitting her arm and elbow on the hood of your car with a loud "thunk". You thought maybe you hit her cause she bounced some. Then you saw she had a broken nose that was spitting blood. One hand held on to the rose colored chenille bathrobe keeping it half closed. She looked directly at you, in your eyes, and you could tell she was terrified. She looked back from the direction she'd come from and there came this tall dude with a wooden baseball bat in his big hand. I'll never understand how you got out of the car, put your arm around the woman's shoulders then scooted her into the back seat.

The dude came right up on you and you simply looked him in the eyes and said, "Not today, man. Not today." You calmly slid back into the driver's seat and drove off to the hospital with the woman's screams drowning out the morning traffic report. Your generosity and courage....