I’ve read the obituaries for as long as I can remember.  I picked up the habit from my mother.  She reads very few things; catalogues,there should be a second thing because this is a list and the obituaries.  Like I said, very few things. 

My husband, and now children, tease me for flipping to the dead people section.  In truth, it’s the first thing I want to read when I open the paper. But in an effort to seem less Lydia Deetz, I make a good faith effort at the Front Page and Real Estate sections.

For most of my obit career, I was reading to reassure myself that more old people than young people die and when young people die, it’s from diseases of which I have no symptoms.  This practice may have actually contributed to my recovery from I’m Going to Die Young Disorder.

I digress but here’s a relevant case study for IGTDYD: I have a clear memory of sitting on my mother’s lap in the passenger seat driving home from Sunday dinner. I’m about 10 years old.  Gazing up at the star filled sky, I’m wondering how she will go on since I will die of cancer shortly.  If memory serves, I had a small swollen gland under my chin.  In retrospect, I should have been more anxious that I was sharing a single seat belt in a car with no air bags while hurling down the 101 freeway, my brother and two step brothers safely anchored in the back seat.

In the last couple of years, my interest in the obituaries has taken a curious and strangely positive twist. (Completely antitype for me.) People have led amazing and fulfilling lives!  They have devoted themselves to causes and careers, passions and hobbies, their family and friends!  They have taken up space with their actions and provided inspiration to their communities. Their absence will leave a vacuum, their vacancy truly mourned.  Now I started wondering what my obituary would look like.

Another quick aside and a fuck you to middle school teachers everywhere who made me and other kids write their own obituary as a creative writing assignment.  I had been nowhere, accomplished nothing, and had made no relevant contribution to human kind.  Your assignment contributed to my IGTDYD, made me think I’d go nowhere, accomplish nothing or make any kind of relevant contribution to human kind.  You should have a bumper sticker that says I was Common Core Before Common Core Sucked Ass.

And now back to my obituary.  Sure I’d be missed. But eventually my family would figure out how to decide what they wanted eat.

So I’ve been working on making this a life well lived.  I’ve dug down deep to rediscover interests I’ve had and dropped or hobbies and causes I always wanted to pursue.  I’m a little embarrassed to share with you yet everything I’m working on but here’s a small hint, you just read one of them.