Grave markers, like those at Golden Hill Memorial Park in Colma, aren’t known for their descriptiveness. It’s the obituary that gets the true last word — the enduring testament to everything people think matters about you.
A few weeks ago, my uncle passed away suddenly. The next day, his children asked me to write the obituary, which was due to the local newspaper within 24 hours to make the Sunday print deadline. I immediately took the rest of the week off; not just to mourn, but to make this obit happen.
I’m the sole journalist in my large, mostly STEM-and-business-flavored family, so the ask wasn’t surprising. Penning obituaries is an essential part of the newspaper skillset, after all. But as I quickly flipped through online listings of obituaries to refresh my memory of what’s supposed to go in these things, I realized that, as journalists, we don’t really get a chance to commemorate people who didn’t expose corruption in political groups, didn’t get into the Internet Hall of Fame and were never nominated for Oscars.
Most people don’t get treated to a tribute by someone as accomplished as the Chronicle’s Sam Whiting — the man only has so much time on his hands. That leaves the task to family members mired in grief who often don’t have time to mull over phrasing, especially when the only essential thing is to let people know when the funeral is. The consequence is that many obits of our loved ones read, at best, like resumes or snippets of the phone book.
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Reading through the paid obituary pages made me more aware of the terror of mortality than death itself.
What do we remember about our dead? What do we want other people to remember?
Physical grave markers aren’t known for their descriptiveness. It’s the obituary that gets the true last word. With the internet, the write-up is an enduring and collectively acknowledged testament to everything other people think matters about you. (On top of that, paid obituaries aren’t usually edited, so any typos will be a stain on your soul for all of eternity.)
What we highlight says so much about what we, the living, value.
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In the 17th century, the English writer John Aubrey anticipated the modern obituary in his collection of biographies called “Brief Lives,” in which he chronicled departed friends, family members and public figures like William Shakespeare. He put a priority on emphasizing the things he valued. (Including, in some cases, his subjects’s erotic encounters.)
In the section on Sir Francis Bacon, Aubrey included a list of the philosopher’s written works and diagrams of his household gardens. If his subjects had unbalanced humors, he noted that as well. (English physician William Harvey was “very cholerique,” for example.)
These days, the average person can pay a small fee to announce a death in their local paper or even just on the internet. Read enough of them and it’s possible to discern larger patterns of thought with such a plethora of anonymous authors. At their most basic, obituaries are as much a part of the dominant culture as anything else is. In the contemporary obituaries I read, women were largely praised for their devotion to their families and men for their hobbies and academic, military and professional careers.
As I wrote my uncle’s obituary, I worried about how my own biases would color it.
In retrospect, one of the first questions I posed to my cousins before writing about their father now makes me cringe.
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“What were his accomplishments?” I asked. Maybe there was an award I could include, I thought, at least some kind of fancy title.
“Well,” one of them ventured, “he created a good life for us.”
“Is that it?” I shamefully caught myself wondering.
I kept pressing, and what my cousins gave me weren’t accomplishments in the usual newsworthiness sense. I eventually came to realize the things my cousins were telling still felt no less important than a Nobel Prize: how he learned to make durian and green tea ice cream late in life, his love for Vietnamese pop songs, how he installed the front door at my cousin’s new house and how his pickleball friends were intimidated by and in awe of his prowess on the court.
These were all the things that made up his life and relationships. Of course, they should be celebrated in his obituary.
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A week later, at the funeral, family members thanked me for writing about my uncle. Even though I stressed so much about getting it right, doing this felt like the only thing I could contribute to an awful situation. A man just shy of retirement age was dead, and I was anxious about word choice. How stupid.
But on reflection, putting the minutiae of a person’s life on a pedestal can help soothe the pangs of a community’s grief. The act gives love a direction to flow — and allows the bereaved to find comfort in the vast expanses of everyday existence that, in the scheme of things, outweigh the peaks that we typically think are the only important parts of life.
When I did my initial obituary research, I admit that worried a lot about not being “captured” correctly myself. But when I die, I now hope whoever writes about me will pay attention to the boring stuff, too.
Reach Soleil Ho (they/them): soleil@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @hooleil
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