Posted on 01/14/2004 2:12:31 PM PST by Cagey
John Bunyan Craver got right to the point: "If you're reading this right now, I guess I'm dead. ..."
And in doing so, he joined a growing group of people who have penned their own obituaries.
Although no one is keeping statistics, devoted readers of obits say more and more do-it-yourself death notices are cropping up in newspapers and on Web sites.
Self-styled obits range from the earnest and sincere, to the macabre. (One Web site will print a fake obituary you can send to friends and family "just to see who cries.")
Indeed, writing your own obit has become a popular tool for "life coaches" and motivational speakers as a way of reviewing your life's course and (presumably) correcting it.
In other cases, it's a timesaver. The news service United Press International recently sent out a memo to ex-staffers asking them to prepare their own after many of its employee records got lost during bankruptcy proceedings.
Some people were happy for the chance to set the record straight. Al Webb, who worked for UPI for nearly three decades, welcomed the opportunity. "It stops all that speculation about how I managed four marriages and three divorces, the names of my twenty-five cats, and the real reason I missed fifteen airplanes getting from Saigon to Da Nang," he told the Columbia Journalism Review.
For most, though, it's a chance to have the final say.
Jeanne Sather, 49, decided to write her own obit after attending a funeral where the personality of the deceased seemed curiously expunged.
"She had this wicked laugh, so out of control you had to laugh with her," she said. But you wouldn't have known that from the funeral.
"It was a girl I'd gone to school with, but it was like it wasn't even her."
And that's not her only motivation for writing her own obit. Sather, a Seattle writer who is facing her fourth recurrence of cancer, has published a popular online journal about coping with illness, and wanted the chance to control the language used in her own obituary.
"A part of me wants to have the last word," Sather said. In particular, she wants to say something other than "died after a long, courageous battle with cancer."
No one ever dies after a "brief, cowardly skirmish" with cancer, she said laughing in a recent interview. But she's still hoping for a better alternative, maybe "lived well with cancer," or "died after her long dance with cancer has come to an end."
Such autobiographical obits may be poignant or pointed.
"I had a perfect life, and believe that I may have experienced Heaven on Earth, if that is possible," wrote John Carl Norman, a former elementary school principal in the Mukilteo School District who died of cancer in August at age 47.
Mark Reiman, an Everett middle school music teacher and wrestling coach who died last April at age 50, had this to say about his own death:
"My body, my earthly shell, finally gave out after fighting and living with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) since 1991," he wrote. "I drained every quality minute I could from my body and it was a wonderful, beautiful, incredible life filled with love, learning, adventure and some mighty challenges."
These kinds of obits have a special power to move readers, said Carolyn Gilbert, founder of the Texas-based International Association of Obituarists, and a collector of obits.
"A number of those who write their own are people who know they are dying," she said. "These are not sweet and fluffy."
Thinking about writing your own makes you view your life through a very different prism.
Putting your thoughts about how you'd like to be remembered on paper forces you to ask, "Have I done that?" Sather said. "And if you're looking back on your life from almost the end, (to ask) 'What do I want to do with the time I have left?' "
Of course, some people can't resist the allure of a final soapbox.
"I've got some bad news for you (besides the fact that I am dead)," Craver wrote in his obit, which was published Sept. 9, 2002, in the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina. "... just as I had always suspected, God is a Republican."
Or as Susan Lane, a former New York fashion model who graduated from college in her 50s, wrote in her own obituary published last year in the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia: "Susan was an eternal optimist, an unapologetic liberal and a delightful dinner and party guest. She was never a member of the NRA or the Republican Party."
Some people want the last laugh.
Buried in the information Cornelia Bostick Harbison supplied for her own obit was this: "She was a member of the First Presbyterian Church; extremely active throughout her life in a number of charitable, community and arts organizations; an avid tennis player; and maintained a strong desire to be contacted by aliens."
Intrigued, Gilbert of the obituarists' group contacted Harbison's husband, who said his wife had an interest in the extraterrestrial and her bridge-playing pals used to give her grief about it.
"So she decided she would put that sentence in her otherwise very conservative obit and folks who knew the joke would get it, and those who didn't know how her friends had kidded her all those years would just wonder what that could possibly mean," Gilbert said.
Writing your obit is also a chance to put your own spin on things. In a story he wrote for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, reporter Bill Janz recalled being ordered 30-plus years ago to write his own obit by a pragmatic older editor who pointed out, "the problems in getting the essential facts of a person's life under the pressure of deadline can be offset by advanced preparation."
Janz wrote: "I couldn't decide whether to begin it by saying, 'The sweetest, nicest person who ever lived died yesterday,' or be more modest and just say 'the nicest.' "
One of his colleagues, an environmental reporter, was equally self-laudatory, mentioning he was known "throughout the state for his grasp of sewage."
Not everyone has the stomach for this type of self-analysis, however.
Reached at home, Janz said he believed the editor, who has since retired but is still among us, has his own prewritten obit -- but he assigned a reporter to do it for him.
Obit connoisseurs do encourage honesty.
When the British Medical Journal said it was going to have to cut down on the number of doctor obits it published, the move prompted a flurry of responses.
"Obituaries that contain nasty, scurrilous, outrageous, and possibly libelous comments should take precedence over ones extolling well known virtues and accomplishment," wrote one London physician in a passionate, if tongue-in-cheek, letter to the editor.
"People would much prefer to read about aspects of the dead person that were hitherto unsuspected. It must be remembered that obituaries are written for the entertainment of the living."
Of course, they're also written for history and posterity.
More than one person has been shocked into evaluating what their own obits will say after accidentally seeing them in print -- most famously the Swedish inventor and engineer Alfred Nobel.
When Nobel's brother, Ludvig, died in 1888, a French newspaper inadvertently published an obituary about Alfred, who was most famous at the time for having invented dynamite. The translated headline read, "The merchant of death is dead."
Although there is no documentation to prove it, many now believe that the incident prompted Nobel, a pacifist at heart, to found the peace prize that now bears his name.
For the most part, though, writing your own obit is a way to make yourself a blueprint for living.
"I will write my own obit," Sather said. "And in two years, I can update it."
Obit: "Mr. X was a family man and his children were the centerpiece of his life."
Rebuttal: "Mr. X could have given lessons to tomcats in heat. The zippers on his trousers had to be made of the same ablative material used on the Space Shuttle."
To the innumerable starlets, supermodels, and porn stars who clamored day and night to make the list, I'm sorry I couldn't get around to you, but I'm a busy guy, and three a day was probably what kilt me.
To my grieving relatives, kiss my grits, buckaroos, I did find a way to take it with me!
To the Woodinville police department, it was me all along, you donut-eating simps. The locks on the corrals and the feedlots couldn't keep me out...
To the IRS - $8500 a year for pennicillin is too a legitimate medical deduction. Check with my doc.
To all my buddies on FR, the gold and jewels are buried in
Those of us with elderly parents should also think ahead and talk with them about funeral arrangements if they haven't already planned themselves. Having gone through the funeral arrangement experience for my Mother, sister and two Aunts, I know that having many of these little details already planned helps you with the grieving process by not having to worry about them when the time comes.
Darn!...and that when, the connection was broken...never to be heard from again.
I've wondered what's going on lately in the Obits. It must be a new trend to send in a 40 year old photo of the dearly departed. I've read some obits that said the guy was 87 and there the photo is with him in a Tux, a full head of hair and hardly a wrinkle on his face!
Why am I reading Obits, anyway? I guess I just want to make sure I'm not in them.
So when has that ever stopped me???
Argh, isn't that what your psychiatrist tells you?
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