Contributions May Be Made in Memory
Christine Perkins
I toil in death. For part of every work day I read and edit obituaries for a law school’s alumni magazine. With a morbid fascination, disguised as occupational interest, I pore over obituaries of individuals who, at different times, all attended the same law school and who are now all dead. The people about whom I write have advised presidents and been knighted by queens. They have founded companies, firms, and institutions and run governments, cities, and towns. They have judged laws and men. Many are remembered as pioneers, preeminent scholars, civic leaders, Renaissance men, or family men. Many have left legacies, but most have lived lives. I absorb the details of those lives and deaths, and write life summaries for them. Though we never met in life, I imagine who they may have been and what they may have meant to others by the particulars contained in their obituaries.
Reading obituaries is a variation of the voyeurism I engage in while riding the subway or walking in the mall. I imagine I can decipher clues about other people’s lives by their appearances. The manner in which they tilt their heads, fold their hands, or carry their shoulders informs my impression of their inner thoughts. I invent lives for strangers based on the way they adorn themselves: the tattoo inscribed on an arm, the ring on a finger, or the style of their hair.
An obituary often reduces people’s lives to the sum of their work, shadowing the nuances of what made those individuals unique: “for forty years, he was an accountant with…” or “she was a housewife who raised twelve children….” But a good obituary provides a glimpse into interests or adventures, recalling a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan operas, a founder of a miniature book society, a prisoner of war in Stalag Luft I in Germany, or a writer of lyrics. It captures traits that define a person’s character or personality, and hints at what he valued in life: the man who wore a hat and scarf every day, long after it had gone out of fashion; the man who went to the office four days a week until six months before his death at the age of ninety-six; or the nationally-ranked tennis player in his twenties, who started running at the age of fifty and ran in twenty marathons, the last at age seventy-five.
Sometimes an obituary uncovers details in death that never surfaced in life. Despite years of sharing a common boundary of land or a wall dividing an office, a person might never have known her neighbor came from twelve generations of Greek Orthodox priests, or was a special agent for the FBI during World War II, except for reading the obituary. I once called an organization to confirm the correct listing for an alumnus. The head of the association, a longtime friend and colleague of the deceased, was shocked to hear his friend had attended law school for two years. Often the things people hope will not define them in life invariably surface to define them in death. A man remembered by his family as a loving father and husband was described in his obituary as a former judge who embezzled money from investors, pleaded guilty to tax evasion, and served time in federal prison. He was immortalized for his transgressions.
The recounting of an individual’s life in an obituary makes history come alive in his death, connecting us to our community and country. In recounting the accomplishments of a man who worked six decades for the same law firm, a family member recalled how he was fired from his first firm in 1932, after two years of stellar work, because he was Jewish. The obituary pages are filled with the history of people who have changed the world in large and small ways: of the man who headed intelligence and security for the Manhattan Project during World War II, who was instrumental in locating and removing 1,100 tons of uranium ore, the products of the German atomic bomb project, before the Russians advanced; of the man serving in the U.S. Navy in 1944 in the Sibuyan Sea who played a part in helping save over 1,300 men aboard the burning USS Princeton during the Battle for Leyte Gulf. But for people like these men, the course of history or generations of an individual family might forever have been altered.
We all have hope for a good death after a life longed lived. We imagine peace for the man who died in the loving arms of his family, or for the avid bibliophile who, at eighty-seven, was found in his favorite chair with a book in his lap and a martini on the side table. But how a person dies is rarely included in my work. In part, the fact that they are dead is information enough. Unexpectedly, suddenly, after a courageous battle or an extended illness, we all die. After reading many obituaries, patterns emerge in the way people die, much of it based on how long they lived. The elderly, afflicted with the ailments of aging, die slowly, diminished by pneumonias, strokes, or injuries suffered in falls. The middle-aged die suddenly, from heart attacks or aneurysms. And the young die accidentally.
Cancers and accidents indiscriminately strike every generation, but they reverberate most resoundingly in the young. Those deaths—the forty-three-year-old history instructor and mother of two, who died of melanoma and was posthumously awarded tenure; the thirty-two-year-old CIA agent killed when a hand grenade detonated too early; the forty-two-year-old litigation attorney diagnosed with brain cancer a few months earlier—elicit the most curiosity, prompting their peers to question how this could have happened. Sometimes how people die becomes the epilogue of their life story, whether it defines their lives or becomes a freak postscript to a life deliberately lived: the aviation enthusiast who flew stunt planes, who died while piloting his own plane, or the town counselor and attorney who bought a new motorcycle at the age of sixty-six, after having last ridden one in his twenties, who crashed into a tree and was found dead with only seventeen miles on the odometer.
I learn a lot about people’s lives in the way I receive notices of their deaths. I have received a FedEx box stuffed full of newspaper clippings covering the tragic death of a prominent lawyer, sent from a former associate in his law firm. I received the most clippings for a man whose professional accomplishments and affiliations seemed no greater or less than any others, yet six different alumni throughout the country thought I should know that he had died. I have received personal letters with photos and eulogies attached, sent by family and friends. I have received packets of obituaries compiled by researchers scanning newspapers for keywords and phrases. And I get piles of returned mail scrawled with various messages: “Our dear Mr. Rich has expired” or “Died 6/15/2003. Please stop all mailings.”
The existence of an obituary often reveals most about the end of a person’s life. Who is left behind to fill out the funeral home form for the newspaper or dictate the contents and stories of a lifetime for the obituary writer? Is there any one left who cares, is able, or thinks it is important to send news of another’s death? Many people die without written recordings of their deaths published in a newspaper. In my magazine, without an obituary, the notice of a person’s death is limited to when they graduated, where they lived, and when they died. When “information unknown” is listed next to the name of the deceased, I search to find something to say. I once found a love story of two people who led parallel lives with different spouses for over fifty years before meeting in their late eighties. They shared eight happy years together, traveling to Europe and cruising the Caribbean, before he died at the age of ninety-seven. I have also found newspaper accounts of a former editor of a large newspaper, suffering from dementia in his old age. He hired someone to care for him who instead absconded with $120,000 after eight months, leaving him destitute. For all his education and experience, his greatest misfortune was to have nobody to care for him when his mind failed him.
I read of one obituary writer who had already written obituaries for herself and all of her family members, just in case. But I believe obituaries are not ours to write. Privately or in the public forum of the newspaper, many of us hope that the sum of our lives will amount to something more than an accounting of how we spent our time. We hope there will be a meaning or value assigned to how we lived that had influenced others, whether in our immediate friendships and families or in our chosen professions or fields of interest. We hope our own thoughtful biographers have been observing us and our lives, and feel, in our absence, the need to publicly share the loss of and remember the gift of us with others. But it is the task of those who have surrounded us in life and survived us in death to choose what it is we should be remembered for.
On a recent Sunday, a visiting deacon to my church interpreted the gospel reading by recalling a visit to a cemetery. Wandering among the headstones, he noticed a grave for a girl who died at the age of three and, close by, a grave of a man who lived eighty-seven years. He pondered what kind of lives each may have lived, who they were or might have been had their life circumstances or durations been different. He wondered what they might have meant to those they left behind, and what difference their living and dying made in the lives of those who loved them. He noted they had different names, were born in different months and years, lived for different lengths of time, and died on different days. The only thing they had in common was the dash separating the day they were born from the day they had died. How each of us chooses to live that dash is the story of the obituary.
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