Live an irresistible obituary

“It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.” –Anne Sexton

I read obituaries. I’ve read them for years.

And sometimes I’m rewarded with a gem of a life’s story, or a spectacular turn of phrase: “He had a God-given talent for operating heavy machinery” was one such jewel, culled from the Asheville Citizen-Times.

But it was the obituary of Miss Lavern Lorenz that recently captured my imagination: “Two years prior to her death, Aunty began letting go of parts of her notorious personality. No longer did we hear dirty jokes—the farmer and the visiting minister, the ‘pretty little ballerina,’ the frog in the pond who said, ‘No, I told you, no, no, no!’—and many, many more.”

 

“Aunty,” it continued, “loved to eat. She once topped out at a sturdy 215 pounds, though she would have to strain to make 5’3.” Meatloaf, sauerkraut with pork and potatoes, chicken and dumplings, bread pudding, tomatoes and crackers, fried cabbage, creamed corn and always something with gravy. Over time, her food desires haikued to a two-minute egg, soft Italian white bread with black raspberry jam, and lukewarm milk.”

Haikued, indeed.

It appears that Aunty hated cats, “even on commercials, and would readily scream upon seeing one. Aunty could recite all the presidents in chronological order and give you a short biography of each one.”

Years ago, there was an outcry when The Washington Post created a template for obituaries requiring 2-3 word descriptors to appear in bold type just under the name of the recently departed, a shorthand of a life, a telegraph of humanity. How to capture a whole lifetime of living in a snappy subtitle? My personal favorites included “Safecracker” and “Snap, Crackle, Pop Creator.” (What would mine be? Yours?)

I wrote my stepfather’s obituary recently, a longish story that violated the puritanical staccato of most Southern Baptist death notices (He lived. He tithed. He died. He went Home) by elaborating just the tiniest bit on how he lived. In the process, I started wondering about my own obituary, inevitable as it is. What words would capture me? What kindnesses would stand out? What adventures would define my sense of spirit? What relationships would be mentioned as core to who I am? What about my food preferences, favorite jokes, and capabilities relative to heavy machinery?

So I wrote mine on a Tops Docket Gold legal pad (the kind with satisfyingly thick paper) at around 37,000 feet on my way to Seattle one morning. It has become an aspirational statement for me. If this is what I want people to think and say when I’m gone, what daily decisions do I need to make in order to get there?

Oprah Winfrey once documented the last days of a young mother dying of cancer who used her final months to make videotaped messages for her young children, leaving behind words of wisdom about living—about falling in love, doing laundry, writing thank you notes, steaming artichokes, creating in the process a primer about how to navigate the big and little things of life, which is what I now realize I’ve been unconsciously doing for my daughters with 37days. She and her husband took their children to Disneyworld and beyond during those final months, anxious to imprint the experiences in the children’s minds for all time, knowing she wouldn’t be with them long.

After the young mother died, Oprah invited her family back to the show. Thinking they would comment on the amazing trips they made together, Oprah asked the children about their best memories of their mother. The little girl quietly responded: “I remember once when my mom asked me to get her a bowl of Cheerios and we ate them together.”

It isn’t the big things. It’s those little ones.

Lest readers of 37days think I sit and ponder death on an hourly basis, there’s usually a reason for my voyages to the Dark Side. There are two this week, including the sudden death of an acquaintance on Thursday night from a heart attack. And one that is farther in the past.

This week, the occasion of my focus is a most painful and regrettable Silver Anniversary.

My life was irretrievably altered when my father died 25 years ago this week, on May 12, 1980, too young at 53 to be going anywhere, much less that far away without companionship or at least a snack. 53 seemed old to my teenaged self, and it is shockingly young now as I grow nearer to it myself. If my network of friends met the same fate, most of them would already be dead. I now realize how utterly cruel it was for him to cease so early.

I was too young then to honor him as he deserved. So here is just a tiny part of the story I have written to him, these too many years later:

Melvin Lonnie Digh had deep laugh lines when he died because it seems he was always smiling, that crinkly and crooked smile that turns the eyes down slightly at the outside corners. His funeral was standing-room-only at Calvary Baptist Church
because he was a giver, and people came from all around – even from Missouri! – to give him something back, a nod, a prayer, a salute.

Daddy was a barber, the real kind—the leather-and-porcelain- chair, hot-lather-machine, straight-razor-that-he- sharpened-on-a-leather-razor-strop kind of barber, not the frou-frou beauty salon stylist fancy-smelling-products kind. Modern Barber Shop was my after school refuge – the feel of hot lather, those steaming hot towels, the smells of blue and green tonics in which the black plastic combs stood, the piles of hair on the floor.

He was always a “room mother” when I was in elementary school, an oddity for the time, the only man amidst a bevy of women, icing orange and black cupcakes for Halloween parties and greasing the pig for Field Day. As a young girl, I would hold hands with him and gently step onto his always perfectly shined hard black leather wingtip shoes, one socked foot on each shoe, to twirl a bit. He was particular about those shoes, they slept with wooden posts inside them, so dancing on them was an honor as well as a pleasure. Many afternoons he treated me to a fake shave at the barbershop, lathering up my face, holding me captive under hot towels wrapped efficiently like a white cinnamon roll. When Mama wanted to keep me from leaving at age 16 to live in Sri Lanka as an exchange student, it was Daddy who simply said, “she’s going.” An adventurer caught in a small town, he and I plotted to return to Sri Lanka  to celebrate my college graduation. He didn’t make it to that, to my wedding, to my many moments of needing him, or to the births of my two girls, for whom he is an abstract form, an ancient ancestor, a mere photograph.

A thin rail of a man named Leon used to work in Modern Barber Shop, young and second chair from the door. Leon didn’t figure into my young mind as eloquently as Freddy (fourth chair, nearest Daddy’s chair, a place of honor) since I was convinced that 30-year-old Freddy was in love with 9-year-old me because he gave me his skate key on May 2, 1968. When Daddy sold the barber shop because of his heart (I just this moment realized that it was not because of gout, as I was told at the time), Leon left to be a policeman. Five years later, as the processional with the last bits of Daddy and over 200 cars made their way to the cemetery, there on a traffic island, alone and standing at attention in full dress uniform, one white-gloved hand over his eye at a full salute, the other holding his hat over his heart, was Leon, a moving tribute to a small-town barber who was so much more than that.

When May 12^th arrived, Daddy died a death that had started with his first heart attack at 47 and ended with liquid filling his lungs because his heart couldn’t pump it out fast enough. His life and his death have made me who I am. But, to be honest, I would have preferred to be less of a person if it kept him here longer.

Twenty-five years, Daddy. You’ve been here all along.

“To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.” -Thomas Campbell, Hallowed Ground

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

My grandmother’s house abutted the N.C. State mental institution’s graveyard, a source of rampant and consuming fear when I was a child. Once, on a dare from my brother, I ran into the graveyard, shocked to a standstill at what I found: miles of chain stretched between short white poles, small metal tags hanging at respectable distances. Names of the insane dead? No, just numbers: 12147, 12148, 12149, miles of them. Write your own obituary so you are not just a number or just a name, but a story. Write it from three perspectives: as your family would write it, your closest friends, and people in your community or at work. What would each of those groups remember most vividly about you? What stories would they tell? What laughs would they recall? Not the big things—the professional achievements, blah, blah, blah, but the little things—the bowls of Cheerios together, eating cupcakes without using your hands, the time in the sandbox, your God-given talent with heavy machinery, the tiny adventures of everyday life. What do you hope they say and what daily choices can you make to ensure that they do? Live an extraordinary and irresistible life to ensure that when you die, the people who are left have the feeling that with your passing the world has become a duller place.