The surprising blessing of writing obituaries. By Vancouver writer Julie Lane-Gay, author of The Riches of Your Grace: Living in the Book of Common Prayer.
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By most standards my father lived an accomplished life. In his 84 years he led his family’s company to growth and financial success, he spearheaded significant efforts to protect open space in California. Leaders in government and business luminaries appeared at our kitchen door late at night to seek his advice.
But in all the notes of condolence we received that mentioned Dad’s obituary (and there were a surprising number), not a single person mentioned his accomplishments. No one wrote, “What an astounding career!” or “I am so glad the Chronicle mentioned his work protecting the State Parks.”
What mattered to readers of Dad’s obituary was the story about the time he sat on the floor for nine hours in the vet’s clinic with a longtime employee who was there alone while her beloved dog was dying; that when protestors came to our house to picket Dad’s leadership of the World Wildlife Fund, he uncorked good bottles of cabernet, passed around plates of saltines with dabs of brie, plunked down on the front steps and listened.
After I wrote (reluctantly, I admit) Dad’s obituary, friends asked me to write about their parents, their employees, people at church. As it has become expected for organizations and corporations to post an obituary online shortly after a significant employee has died, I have been hired to “have them ready,” to write as much of the obituary as possible prior to death. A few good friends, aware of this side gig of my writing work, occasionally ask me, “Has anyone hired you to write mine?”
Assuming the 300–800 words are written for a newspaper or website, obituaries follow an expected form – a beginning with the cause and location of death, a middle with facts about their lives and history, an ending with a list of descendants and possibly memorial service logistics. This is usually the easy part. In addition to these staples, one or two family members usually want an extensive list of accomplishments – degrees and schools, positions held at a hospital or tech company, how they taught over a thousand kids to play tennis or led the local food bank to a million-dollar budget.
While most of us are happy to be reminded where our uncle went to university at 15 (while he worked night shifts at the local diner), we look for the stories of who they were far more than what they did, that they were genuinely who we thought they were.
ILLUSTRATION: EVA BEE
This is what I have learned – memorable, honouring obituaries respond to our longings. They verify what we hope it means to be human, that in the end accomplishments fade and kindness, character and love matter most. Put simply, we want to know that in the end, good wins.
A few good friends, aware of this side gig of my writing work, occasionally ask me, “Has anyone hired you to write mine?”
We love finding out a friend from our hockey team rushed off to set up relief stations in Kyiv, even at the peril of losing his job at a law firm. It cheers us to discover that in 2010 our monosyllabic neighbour, who drove a 30-year-old Volvo and discretely swept all our sidewalks, had anonymously ensured there was a ticket to an Olympic event available for every child and parent in the BC Children’s Hospital pediatric oncology ward. We long to be surprised – to have had no clue such kindness ever happened.
We long to know a person was genuine – that our experience of them was who they were to everyone. Was our former boss a coffee snob at home as much as she was at the office? Did our childhood pal go camping with all nine grandchildren sleeping in his tent – or was that just hyperbole? People admit to reading obituaries of coworkers, bracing themselves to find out their experience of the deceased was vastly different from the person who sat in the cubicle next to them.
We long for obituaries to assure us people’s lives were surprisingly like ours – that ordinary is normal. We long to know ordinary lives matter, to be assured the woman who quietly tended numerous curbside city gardens for 16 years, and the guy who routinely showed up at work with homemade doughnuts, had a huge impact. We long for proof that we don’t have to be president of the Toronto-Dominion Bank or lead the Blue Jays to the World Series to have mattered.
Most readers long to have a story or two to hold onto, a moment in the deceased’s life that embodies what we loved about them. When I wrote the obituary of the New Testament scholar Gordon Fee, I included a moment a former student recalled from the first day of his New Testament Literature class at Wheaton College. Gordon had jumped up on the desk at the front of the class and announced, “This is not a class on New Testament! This is a class on immortality! Some day you will hear, ‘Fee is dead.’ Do not believe it! He is singing with his Lord and his King!” Gordon then led the class in singing “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”
If you knew him (or just took one of his classes), this was Gordon to a tee. Such moments give comfort, they bring him back, they help us miss him.
I have also learned what not to write and what not to say. Platitudes prickle and Christian platitudes often hurt the most. When I wrote about a well-known pastor, his daughter said, “Don’t you dare say, ‘Dad is now blessing all those people in heaven!’ Heaven doesn’t need him. I do.” Early on I assumed that clauses such as “grateful she is no longer in pain” were acceptable, but I’ve found even these words demean grief.
I have learned that families, no matter how much they love and enjoy each other, have their tensions, their wounds, and obituaries can tear at them. One daughter wants her longtime boyfriend listed as a survivor, but her brother objects strongly. It can be hard to know who has the final say. I’m often glad to be writing anonymously.
Writing obituaries has also strengthened my faith, largely my faith in Scripture, my confidence in its truth, its wisdom.
No matter how well prepared and predicted, death’s finality almost always lands as a shock. Particularly in Western cultures we feel immune, we forget it’s coming, that as Scripture teaches in Genesis, “to dust we shall return,” and in Ecclesiastes, “He has set eternity in our hearts.” We are not wired for our finitude. One year I had to write an obituary at the end of October, in the same week Halloween skeletons were draping the window boxes of my neighbours’ houses and R.I.P. signs arrayed on their lawns. No doubt the decorations were meant to make death funny, but upstairs I was having heart-wrenching phone conversations with family members, with friends who needed to pause while they teared up and composed themselves to answer my questions. Again and again they interrupted me. “I just can’t believe she’s gone.”
Scripture teaches us we are unique, made in the image of God, that the very hairs on our heads are numbered. As I sleuth out people’s interests and talents, be it playing the hurdy-gurdy, training dolphins or collecting books written in Pirahã, I am reminded people are unique in their distinct combination of their interests and talents. Not only are no two people identical (not even twins), but no two people are even all that similar.
Writing obituaries reminds me of the scriptural truth that how we live matters far more than what we do.
I’ve never been able to copy and paste one obituary to another.
Writing obituaries reminds me of the scriptural truth that how we live matters far more than what we do. Writing obituaries takes me to the Beatitudes, to Jesus’ words, “Where your treasure is, so also shall your heart be,” or to Paul’s urging Timothy on how to live his life, “to do good, to be rich in good deeds, to be generous.”
Sometimes when I read about Jesus teaching His disciples, “When you do good, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,” I think, Yes!
Those who mourn your death love finding out about your life in your obituary.
Julie Lane-Gay is a writer and editor in Vancouver. She is author of The Riches of Your Grace: Living in the Book of Common Prayer (IVP, 2024). Listen to our conversation with Julie Lane-Gay at FaithToday.ca/Podcasts.