The monkey made me do it

Confession

I used to read the obituaries for entertainment.

Never was a goth, never saw the glass as half-empty, never donned the uniform of melancholy and sulked it with pride. I was much more the type who’d wear pajamas in public without a care, swinging my ponytail and wondering why more people weren't wearing flannel pants. But during college I would sneak my newspaper into class and dive into the stories on the back page told with frozen fuzzy photographs and entire lives summed up in a small paragraph of tiny type. I’ve always loved a good story, reveled in them, and the lure of a personal history packaged so completely and efficiently was too good to pass up. The impersonal summation of lives been lived, both brief and overlong, fascinated me in the details of accomplishments and organizations and titles and children and all of the myriad levels of implied love and loss and adventure.

The ones with the pictures were the best. Their faces held endless levels of what seemed to be surprise, masked behind lines and stern expressions or pasted grainy smiles. I created worlds for them not at all based on these images and texts chosen by the ones they loved. I expounded, wove epic tales of unwritten plot twists and secret foreign lives unknown to even his faithful wife of 48 years, Doris. They came back to life in ways their family and friends could never have imagined, sometimes even cavorting with the cute biddy in the second column, second from the top, and eschewing their Elks membership for a chance to run naked through Paris simply because they felt a little warm from all that red wine. I somehow knew that their souls were not content with the content of their tiny, boxed remains.

This is an odd habit to admit, I realize. Strange, perhaps, to focus such personal attention on such a private matter. But you would be wrong to think me unfeeling or unsympathetic to the process of death and honoring of the deceased – it is in fact the exact opposite. My temporary gift to each poorly-focused image and blurb is another chance at becoming the stuff of legend, of being a part of something fantastic and believing them capable of acts that transcend what can be written on the back of a newspaper in 8-point type.

When my grandfather passed away a few years ago, I found myself sitting in his funeral service fixated on the horrible wan photo that was printed in the program, right next to the words for “The Old Rugged Cross”. His final years were spent bent weakly, shuffling through a tiny one-bedroom apartment that had one window and smelled like cigarettes to offer us frostbitten, five-year-old Fudgesicles that continually populated his freezer. My siblings and I always accepted with an almost believable show of gratitude, only to leave the pigeons outside baffled by our shrine of spotted icicles and crystal-covered sticks. The end of his life was characterized by crippling diabetes and a deep misery that left him stealing other people’s breakfast syrup and drinking it out of desperation. He didn’t recognize any of us, didn’t barely even speak.

(But not anymore)

posted by LadyJay @ 2:23 PM