In the end

If you are a curious person, you can just follow Google around all day. I followed it all the way to the website for the Society of Professional Obituary Writers the other day. Their tagline is: "Writing About the Dead for a Living" so there you go. They look like a pleasant group of people in their pictures and they even give out awards. The SPOW (I like that it has POW! in it) even has a Lifetime Achievement Award. A prolific obit writer named Jim Nicholson won it this year, but maybe if you start now you will have a shot at that.

So all of that got me thinking about obituaries and I discovered you can even follow steps online to writing a good one. Really, for a lot of folks their obituary is the only evidence of their existence on the internet so you want to get it right in case you are googled yourself one day. What you don't want to do is leave it to your ex-spouse Pee Wee to write your obit, which is what this guy did. Probably Mr. Conway wasn't expecting to die and that's how this happened.  

And then there are folks who use the obituary as a way to get in a final dig. Listen to what Dolares Aguilar's family said about her in the Times-Herald Napa/Sonoma paper:

"Dolores had no hobbies, made no contribution to society and rarely shared a kind word or deed in her life. I speak for the majority of her family when I say her presence will not be missed by many, very few tears will be shed and there will be no lamenting over her passing… There will be no service, no prayers and no closure for the family she spent a lifetime tearing apart."

Yikes.

Some folks write their own before they die and I guess that's helpful, but maybe other folks would at least have a few things to add. I spotted a few of those and it seemed that most of them didn't say very many kind things about themselves. Someone else might have shined them up a little given the chance.

I don't live for the end, if you know what I'm saying. I'm not doing things hoping folks will speak highly of me when I'm dead, but I do hope there's enough good things to say by the end of it that my obituary can be a proud piece of work for someone (maybe even the famous Jim Nicholson of SPOW would consider it?). I thought if I started the draft then someone could just edit it and that might be good. If I follow the format I found online, I think it should go something like this:

Mrs. Lori Davies Barfield, age unpublishable, died in the strangest incident of spontaneous combustion on Wednesday. She exited this life in an event described by witnesses in the Walmart electronics section as a BLAZE OF GLORY.

She is survived by her husband, Mr. Kenneth E. Barfield, who loved her and who fiercely and frequently protected her from the consequences of any number of license and user agreements she signed willy-nilly with AT&T and Apple and Comcast, etc. His patience in repeatedly explaining the alarm system to her in their home was a constant testament to his affection for her. She will be missed by her adoring and talented Academy Award winning daughter Olivia who recently cured cancer as well as her step-son who calls her frequently from his relief work (which earned him a Nobel Prize this year) in Africa.

She was known for laughing and falling and also laughing at other people's falling usually at the most inappropriate times. Her laugh at least caused others around her to laugh so that was worth something. She started painting in her 40s, but could only paint birds, and boy she painted a lot of those so they are for sale in the funeral home lobby (proceeds to go to the William S. Davies Homeless Shelter). She had 5 good friends who loved her as much as she loved them. She did not sass-talk her parents. She loved to read, but always said she liked her own life better than the ones in the books. In the end, the rotten things she did were outweighed by the kind things she did so that worked out well. She attended the First Baptist Church where she was frequently overheard telling the pastor he'd delivered a hell of a sermon. She loved sunshine and never had a cavity.

Details regarding the celebration of her life will be published as soon as the Barnum and Bailey Circus agrees to terms.

So, that's a start.