Of Course Everybody Loves Obituaries and Reading Them

Trigger Warning: Obituaries and Reading Them

The hospice I am finishing training to volunteer at is having us write our own obituaries. I have a lot of prep still for this party tomorrow (goat cheese stuffed dates with pecans and honey do not assemble themselves) and still have to do this blog post, and so let’s feed two birds with one scone.

Margarita Lovelace has died of —

Oh dear. We had a worksheet last time of four ways to die, and we discussed our favorite ones.

I do not know if every hospice organization has its members go through these exercises, and I just was not in the right premed circles in college to overhear these conversations.

But alright. Let’s go.

I wrote that of the four choices listed, I would prefer to have both arms and one leg amputated, and then die of old age. (The other options presented were dying painlessly in four months, after learning about it and learning there is nothing you can do, dying in 5 years from a debilitating cancer, or dying instantly, right now, from a heart attack).

(Everybody gave different answers, when discussing this question! The reasons were very personal, and also varied based on if dependents were in the picture, and life stage. It was deeply moving to hear everybody’s thoughts.)

I see that if I live to old age, what is likely to take me is heart disease or cancer. I imagine I would have some compounding illnesses, perhaps a strange cancer that they can’t really diagnose, and before figuring it out I would die of a respiratory disease because I kept socializing, or something like this.

Perhaps I would sort of faint and waste away, listening to audiobooks and watching movies. I would insist that somebody come in and turn off the motion blur setting that makes everything look like a soap opera.

I would also insist to be near a window, and for there to be plants around me. This way I can look at organic shapes and chill out.

Maybe I would make paintings until my dying breath, or keep memorizing and repeating poetry. Maybe I would get a heart attack playing tennis.

I am not sure what this meditation is supposed to accomplish — I hope I am doing it right.

The idea behind including this in the training is that people are much better at this job if they have grappled with their own mortality.

The second idea behind it (I bet) is that there isn’t actually that much they can do to prepare all the new volunteers in the three all-day sessions before shadowing and on-the-job training, apart from general explainers of the different staff, departments, and basic protocols, but still they would want to do something so that we bond and understand what we are getting ourselves into. And so preparing us emotionally in this way is probably the best way to use our time, rather than — I don’t know, oral quizzes on protocols.

But enough on the meta. Obviously I am distracting myself. I am supposed to be writing my obituary! They sent us a “fun” obituary to read as an example, and some of us will be reading ours out loud.

Ack.

The “fun one” included surviving people who loved them, pets. Communities they were involved in. Cause of death. What loved ones said about them.

What real ones have I read in my life? I’d read the ones of people I know who’d died. I’d read completely garbage pieces doing a hatchet job on people I care about. I would make a few clicks on Facebook and be checking someone out, only later realizing they had died, and I’d read that. Or a celebrity who I was checking out who I didn’t hear any news about for a while.

I have no idea what anybody would say about me because truth be told I don’t know who would be around to do any of the saying. I hope that my friends would say that I was a good friend. I hope they would say that I was ethical and inspiring in some way, and that I moved them, and helped them live the life they wanted to be living in some way. If I write this as if I died suddenly, tomorrow, that would also be a bit of a different activity — and really intense.

There would be a focus on immediate family as my main locus of identity. “Survived by” the other immediate family members. But there is so much life that this would fail to capture. So many other “Survive by” people who would be on that list.

They might know who they are, and might know who the others are, because they are in Signal group chats with each other.

And then ah! what would all my Signal chats say?

I am getting too emotional, thinking about it!