I wrote my obituary last week. I often do so once a year; it has become a kind of ritual.
I’ve met a few others who do the same or something similar. A teacher I know likes to start every new year by writing her obituary or what she hopes it will look like by year’s end. Another friend writes hers on Rosh Hashana. Recently a close friend wrote his life story as part of the process to get on the kidney transplant waiting list, and it occurred to me that’s exactly what their paragraphs resembled: a living obituary.
The first time I wrote my obituary, I was 12 years old. This was not a school assignment or a dramatic lark. My mother was training as a volunteer at our local hospice, and she was required to write her own obituary, an imaginative exercise as preparation to work with terminally ill patients. This assignment was jolting enough to cause some volunteers to quit the training, but my mother stuck with it, and the idea sparked with me immediately.
At the dinner table, my parents and I talked over my mother’s assignment to help her brainstorm. Later that night, I huddled in bed scratching out my own. My aunt, a reporter and photographer, gave me my first journal a few years earlier, and it felt like a natural extension of my daily scribbles. I followed the format of my mother’s assignment: the facts, including age and home; survivors; achievements in work or school; and finally, community, or how people might remember me.
My mother continued to work in hospice for the next 20 years, and I continued to write my obituary on a mostly annual basis, even after she stopped volunteering. As I grew to accept that every patient my mother met would soon die, some within hours of their meeting and others after months, I also came to understand that most people outside our house could not tolerate talking much about death, especially their own.
The result of this ritual obituary writing is not as maudlin as it might seem. If you take a few minutes to try it, you might find the same. In about a page or so, I usually end up with a gentle accounting of the year, held against all the past ones. I found many of the accomplishments that felt precious one year were hardly worth a mention the next.
Some years are short and perfunctory; some swell with joy and hope, pride even. There is a comfort in the accumulation, like the stacking of blocks — daughter, wife, mother of one, mother of two. And owning up to the unstacking, too, such as divorces, difficult moves, disruptions and the deaths of others in your life.
