I went to a funeral the other day. My friend Tom’s father died. He was a much-beloved former principal of a local high school. The crowd at his wake snaked out the church door and down the sidewalk. The online obituary about his life and death drew many e-comments from colleagues, former students, and people who didn’t know him but wished they did. The church service and burial had gravitas.
As always happens at funerals, my mind drifted to the important people in my life who have, as my ALDA friend Larry says, “graduated”--my parents, a brother, my father-in-law, other relatives, friends from all periods of my life who died far too early in their own life. Death happens.
I’m not particularly phobic about death. I’ve seen it up close and I don’t avoid ICUs or wakes. I’m sort of okay with my own death as long as the Cubs win the World Series first. Make of that what you will.
But one thing that spooks me is obituaries. I’ve skipped the obituary pages of newspapers my whole life. That’s not surprising when you’re young and six or seven decades of separation from death. But I’m not all that young anymore (which is surprising) and still I move gingerly around and through the section that carries the death notices.
When I was growing up, if my father wasn’t doing the daily crossword, he seemed to look at nothing in the Tribune but the obituaries. I’d walk in the kitchen and he’d have the obit listings spread out before him, a newsprint graveyard with entries arranged like headstones in columns down the page. I didn’t fully appreciate the significance of the page until I was older, but I did learn the words “nee” and “in lieu,” terms found almost nowhere else on Earth in a complete sentence.
My mother also scanned the obituaries when she wasn’t buying high-fat foods. She was our primary herald of death, telling my brothers and me when a family friend or relative had died. You could tell by the sigh in her voice when bad news was coming; it was either a death or she’d seen our report cards.
During my carefree, indestructible 20s and 30s, I did the sports pages and comics, not the obituaries. The world wasn’t particularly big back then and deaths were conveyed by phone tree; because I became deaf the tree branched to my brothers or friends, who brought me the news in person. I actually went to an awful lot of wakes those years—my parents, parents of friends, relatives, even some of my own friends, suddenly gone—but I didn’t find out about a single one of those deaths by reading the obits.
As gray crept into my beard and my 10k times slowed, my brother Bob became the new herald of death. He’s an ophthalmologist with many elderly patients, and he reads the obits religiously to keep track of them. Bob also knows most of my friends from days gone by, and provides me with secondary coverage in case I don’t hear about a death from somebody else.
Why do I avoid the obits? Why will I read every page in the newspaper except that one? Probably because I don’t want people I know and love to graduate, to die. It’s irrational and semi-irresponsible, but if I don’t see a death notice then the fabric of my life remains whole, unchanged, young. It’s the kind of fantasy world thinking you find in Faulkner and Sendak. Let the wild rumpus start.
Not too long ago I noticed that my wife was reading the obits every day. When I first realized this, I said:
“Why are you reading the obits every day?”
“To find out who died,” she said.
“Oh.”
So now I have secondary coverage in the kitchen.
Actually, Facebook and other social networks are the only secondary coverage any of us need these days. Obits have never traveled so fast. A second or two after someone dies, the news appears at the top of our queue, just above an entry like “We are sunnin’ and funnin’ in Cancun! Woo-hooo!!”
But seriously, it’s easy to imagine a site like Facebook replacing the funeral parlor, church, and cemetery as the definitive place for mourning. A status of “Dead” will trigger the ultimate wake, with comments from hundreds of Friends, along with photos, videos, and selected posts by the departed. The burial--official removal of the person’s account—will prompt a notification both to Friends and to People You May Know.
We all need to prepare for this future; we need to revise our wills with instructions on how we want to be memorialized on Facebook. After several days of contemplation, I think I’m ready to get the lawyer and the notary. When I graduate, I want my Facebook status to permanently read: “Bill Graham, nee Superstar….[yadda yadda]…in lieu of burial change Profile to say, in bold face, Summa cum laude.” And put a tassel on my virtual urn.
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