Why read obituaries

Consider the life of Laurel Hester, a lesbian police lieutenant who died of cancer at age 49. A month before her death, she had convinced the Ocean County freeholders to change their pension rules and approve a resolution to allow enforcement employees to designate a person other than a spouse to be the beneficiary of pension benefits. The small article about Ms. Hester’s life, at the bottom of page 17 of the Monday February 20, 2006 edition of the New York Times, concludes by saying that “her condition rapidly declined” after the successful meeting with the freeholders.

I am addicted to the simplicity of obituaries, to life distilled to its very core.

Open the paper and here it is: this man changed the world of cheese-making, this other revolutionized quantum physics. This woman loved powerful men but that one wrote books about the lives of worms, or danced her heart out, or was the best fly-fisher on this side of the Mississippi. In the local paper most everybody gets to fight a courageous battle with a dreadful illness or was the ever loving father, daughter, or nephew of someone else.

Most days I anesthetize existential angst in a daily hum-drum of paper-pushing routines and double lattes. But after reading the obituaries I pause to wonder what, in the end, will remain of my passage on Earth. Will it be the children I raised? The stories I wrote? The medical plan I administered so someone might win that courageous battle with the dreadful illness? Or will it be something more mundane, like the scarf I knitted absent-mindedly on the plane home from France but that might somehow be preserved for the next five hundred years and eventually displayed in a museum exhibit on “21^st century fiber arts”?

Or will the-thing-that-matters-most happen at the very end, like it did for Laurel Hester? The article does not say what she thought of her life. Had she been asked she might have talked about her love for her partner Stacie Andree, for whom she fought till the very end.  It's always about love.

Obituaries are condensed little romance novels offering us glimpses into someone else's love.  Delivered in neat paragraphs with a photograph of the main protagonist, they are meant to remind us that our combined hearts tick with the passion that makes the world go round.   They are tiny reminders of our intertwines lives and our struggles for meaning.  Let's read them, by all means.  Let's read.