They Call Me The Breeze
I was looking at an obituary the other day, and it struck me what an odd but efficient summing up a well-written one is. A well-written obituary can give you a good amount of information about a person in a few words or paragraphs. Sort of like a box score of one’s life – a quick look can elicit volumes of thoughts and mental images, and convey a lot of information.
Of course, some people get a little carried away with them. The basic format, roughly, is birth, school, work, death. Often structured vaguely like a pyramid news story, a standard obit tells who the person was and where they were from, who their parents were, where they went to school, who they married, where they worked, who survived them, how they would like to be remembered, and where to go to pay one’s final respects. Nice and neat. Some loving family members get hold of them and they can start to ramble somewhere there in the middle, though. You get a person’s hobbies, who their favorite football team was, etc. But that is okay, too. The obituary, or “memorial” in funeral director-speak, is as much for the departed one’s family as anyone else.
Obituaries are, I am sorry to say, far less lurid in the details of one’s demise than they used to be. In my intermittent genealogy research forays, I have come across some that are quite graphic; for instance, one describing how a great-great uncle was cut in half by a freight train out in Eastland County, or another who was killed by lightning in his barn in Pennsylvania. Then there was my dad’s second cousin and his wife, wiped out in a gory head-on collision near Temple. You don’t get that sort of plain-ness nowadays. Everything is tiptoed around, and one is usually left guessing how the person actually died, which seems to me to be a rather important detail. People used to talk about death quite plainly, perhaps because it was so common in their lives. Now we can hardly utter the word. . . no one dies anymore, the get deceased, they pass on. I almost think we respect death too much now. Instead of seeing it as commonplace, a part of life, we speak of it in hushed tones, as if it is a separate thing. Thomas Mann said once we separate death from life, it becomes an entity in and of itself, and a hideous, horrible thing, a blasphemy almost. But that is a whole other subject.
I haven’t so much lately, but for awhile I would see a lot of obits in the local paper where a person’s nickname, presumably used amongst his/her most intimate intimates, would be included in the header of the memorial. John “Big Boy” Jones. Frank “Butter Bean” Martin. Jerry “Booger Red” Chavis, like that. You know, that may be too much information for the general public. I am one of those people who do not readily evoke colorful nicknames. I have had few nicknames in my life; almost all of them were short-lived and usually just some minor variation on my given name, not very imaginative at all. At times I have rued this apparent shortcoming of mine; but in the long run, it is probably just as well. I don’t have to worry about some ridiculous personal sobriquet being affixed to my memorial by some misguided if well-meaning friend or relative (or secret enemy, I guess.)
I did used to work with a guy once who insisted on calling me “T-Bone” all the time, he never would tell me why. I finally decided it was because he could not remember my real name. Then there was the girl I knew briefly way back when who at certain times would, right in the middle of everything, call me “Clay.” It was more than a little distracting, and later I would ask her, why Clay? “Because you just look like you should be called Clay,” she would say.
Okay, then. Tell ya what. How about from now on you just call me “gone.”
*****
Of course, some people get a little carried away with them. The basic format, roughly, is birth, school, work, death. Often structured vaguely like a pyramid news story, a standard obit tells who the person was and where they were from, who their parents were, where they went to school, who they married, where they worked, who survived them, how they would like to be remembered, and where to go to pay one’s final respects. Nice and neat. Some loving family members get hold of them and they can start to ramble somewhere there in the middle, though. You get a person’s hobbies, who their favorite football team was, etc. But that is okay, too. The obituary, or “memorial” in funeral director-speak, is as much for the departed one’s family as anyone else.
Obituaries are, I am sorry to say, far less lurid in the details of one’s demise than they used to be. In my intermittent genealogy research forays, I have come across some that are quite graphic; for instance, one describing how a great-great uncle was cut in half by a freight train out in Eastland County, or another who was killed by lightning in his barn in Pennsylvania. Then there was my dad’s second cousin and his wife, wiped out in a gory head-on collision near Temple. You don’t get that sort of plain-ness nowadays. Everything is tiptoed around, and one is usually left guessing how the person actually died, which seems to me to be a rather important detail. People used to talk about death quite plainly, perhaps because it was so common in their lives. Now we can hardly utter the word. . . no one dies anymore, the get deceased, they pass on. I almost think we respect death too much now. Instead of seeing it as commonplace, a part of life, we speak of it in hushed tones, as if it is a separate thing. Thomas Mann said once we separate death from life, it becomes an entity in and of itself, and a hideous, horrible thing, a blasphemy almost. But that is a whole other subject.
I haven’t so much lately, but for awhile I would see a lot of obits in the local paper where a person’s nickname, presumably used amongst his/her most intimate intimates, would be included in the header of the memorial. John “Big Boy” Jones. Frank “Butter Bean” Martin. Jerry “Booger Red” Chavis, like that. You know, that may be too much information for the general public. I am one of those people who do not readily evoke colorful nicknames. I have had few nicknames in my life; almost all of them were short-lived and usually just some minor variation on my given name, not very imaginative at all. At times I have rued this apparent shortcoming of mine; but in the long run, it is probably just as well. I don’t have to worry about some ridiculous personal sobriquet being affixed to my memorial by some misguided if well-meaning friend or relative (or secret enemy, I guess.)
I did used to work with a guy once who insisted on calling me “T-Bone” all the time, he never would tell me why. I finally decided it was because he could not remember my real name. Then there was the girl I knew briefly way back when who at certain times would, right in the middle of everything, call me “Clay.” It was more than a little distracting, and later I would ask her, why Clay? “Because you just look like you should be called Clay,” she would say.
Okay, then. Tell ya what. How about from now on you just call me “gone.”
*****
