Like many of my peers, I've lately taken to reading the obituaries. When I was a youthful fellow, I took pleasure in announcements of births and weddings and anniversaries. No longer, alas; nowadays it's nothing but deaths. Reading about the departed is not a habit of which I'm particularly proud. It's an unsavory fixation upon the newly dead -- and is slightly ghoulish to boot. Yet daily checking of the obits is not without a positive side: often it's exhilarating to read about those amazing folks who have survived wars, dictatorships, displacement, injury, and disease to live accomplished and joyful lives. Obituaries are confusing.
It's not that I search out the obits -- they intrude upon me willy-nilly, like it or not.
For one, there's the New York Times which every day memorializes a couple or a dozen famous persons -- some of them people of my exact age cohort -- who have made a mark, for good or ill, in this our shared life. How does one properly respond to such departures? With empathy, certainly. But also, not infrequently, with a touch of reluctant (and embarrassing) survivor-superiority.
I must admit that I'm frequently dazzled by these eminent people's list of accomplishments, even if I haven't the least clue about exactly what they have achieved. My own life has been, it would seem, so dominated by hearth and home, so narrow and provincial that I cannot always appreciate the eulogized. Often they have distinguished themselves in areas of expertise that have completely passed me by: computer technologists who have created portals and platforms that will always lie beyond my ken, physicists who have shed light (incomprehensible to me) on dark mysteries, superstar rappers, mvp's in sports that I didn't know existed, billionaire entrepreneurs with their 35,000 sq. ft. homes and their stupendous megayachts, generals and spies, etc., etc., etc. It's astonishing how little these famous folk have touched me; how little overlap there is between their worlds and mine. Clearly, I've inhabited an impermeable bubble.
If so, why do I care, why do I read their obits, why do I bother to applaud or (secretly and guiltily) pooh-pooh their contributions?
But hey, I can't blame it all on the Times. Every second month, I receive an e-mail notice from the college that I attended, back there in the 50s, that lists the recent deaths of my classmates. Only a few years ago, it was a trickle, now it's a flood. While nothing forces me to open the electronic envelope, nevertheless, I do so, "attracted" as David Copperfield once said about Uriah Heep, "in very repulsion." Nor must I read the obituaries of members of the graduate school through which I slipped, barely noticed, sixty-years ago. Do I remember these people? Rarely, even despite occasional parallels in our careers. In addition, I follow the obituaries in the local Daily Camera. People I know, or, given my fifty-year residence in this fair city, those to whom I am connected by a couple or three degrees of separation. Sometimes I am shocked by the death of a person whom I hadn't heard was ill, or who died suddenly in a bicycle crash or a fall from a step stool. Such revelations deeply disturb a Sunday morning. And yet, is it so horribly wrong for me to congratulate myself that it was not I but that other guy who was mowed down by a speeding truck on Canyon Boulevard? (I had just crossed at that same spot a day before, uneventfully. Luck of the draw!)
Does it matter that the obits that I read are not truly representative of my contemporaries? They are accounts of people who have made something of themselves, lived useful and noteworthy lives. I can't help thinking about the others: the ones who slunk off the planet quietly -- those who were drunkards or druggies, or who were seduced by some weird religious cult and disappeared into the desert, or those who gave up the struggle and took their own lives, or those who retreated. along with their six scrawny cats, to a dirty SRO on the upper West Side (except when they venture to the street to harangue passers-by with their idiosyncratic religious theories).
Even the obits that do come to my notice don't tell the whole story. They're curricula vitae that 99% of the time are entirely laudatory. The ancient tag "de mortuis nihil nisi bonum" is rigorously honored. The notices don't state what everyone knows -- that the dearly departed was a notorious skinflint who squeezed the last nickel from his tenants and his employees, stiffed his partners, and regularly harassed his former friends with nuisance suits. They fail to mention that an apparently upstanding citizen was also a neglectful father who eventually ran off with his peroxided mistress and a Harley, or that he was known to the neighbors as the guy who poisoned the Labrador retriever of that nice elderly couple down the street. Or who was fired because he showed up plastered once too often. Sometimes it's what's left out that's most revelatory. Obits should be read with care; I don't always remember to do so.
But to tell truth it's not the obituaries themselves that bother me --it's my own ambivalence and confusion. Why the fascination with obits? Is it the same impulse that causes commuters to stop and stare at the wreck on the highway? Could it be that I enjoy, genuinely enjoy, reading about the deaths of my fellow creatures? And if I do so, what sort of morally defective person am I? Do I suffer from an incurable case of schadenfreude -- a delight in the misfortunes of others? Or is it even worse -- mere undiluted gloating? For truly, I am forced to admit, there is something almost triumphant about reading an obit. "He's dead, but I'm alive." How pathetic and reprehensible a feeling -- and how transitory! When I am in a generous mood, I know that when I read an obituary, I daren't gloat, but should rather mourn the common fate of all of us poor fragile mortals. "Death is certain, sayeth the Psalmist." "No man is an island entire of himself." Although I might gloat today, tomorrow I too will be as dead as a doornail. Another bucket, mine, will be kicked. And yet I do not always experience the fellow-feeling that I would like to admire in myself. If I'm not a bad person, I'm certainly not always a good one. No question but there's a chasm between what I feel and what I am convinced that I should feel.
Some obituaries present special problems. For example, I am immediately put off when the the obituary begins with the foolish new age euphemism, "he transitioned.... " Such a phrase hardens my heart, I'm sorry to admit. Let's face it; he didn't "transition." He died. But I'm equally saddened by the obituary that announces that "he went to live with the Lord." Such pathetic self-deception.
But the hardest moral problem for me occurs when I come upon the obituary of a person I genuinely disliked. There aren't many of them; I'm not a hater. But still, it's very difficult for me to find genuine empathy for someone I truly loathed. It's wrong for me to rub my hands in triumphant glee because that nasty s. o. b. is gone forever? I would prefer not to be the kind of person who dances on graves.
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