One Small Voice: I have a different take about obituaries

by Lynn Mandaville

I am one of those who feel that we, as Americans, in this age of social media, give away much too much about ourselves. It’s an insidious phenomenon. We give away a little here, a little there, and pretty soon the world has the dreaded “too much information” about us.

David T. Young’s observations on obituaries prompted me to spend an entire day probing my feelings about death and its affiliated conventions. As with all people, my biases come from my upbringing and experiences.

In our family, death was something that happened and from which we moved on. To grieve too much was frowned on, and to make it public was downright disgraceful. When my maternal grandfather died, after years in a nursing home suffering from dementia, I cried at his funeral. My grandmother took me to task at the graveyard, telling me, in essence, to suck it up. My crying was indulgent. I was 12 years old.
Now when someone dies with whom I have had more than a passing relationship, I am curious about what took her away from us. I wish I could read that in her obituary, but I have always kept what I considered a respectful distance, only inquiring about the cause of death from a family member if the contact were appropriate.

In my mind, to probe such information was of prurient interest. Whose business is it of mine to know these private details of another’s life? Isn’t this just another casualty of the times we live in, where nothing is private any more? Not our voting habits, not our medical records, not our online histories?

After a great deal of soul searching I am no better off than when I began. I do see the benefits of giving cause of death that you and Bob Traxler offer. From the responses online to your editorial I get the feeling that my point of view is the one that is out of sync with society in general. That provides a valuable learning opportunity for me.

And so I am left with coping with other aspects of how our culture deals with death. The customs, the trappings, the visible public expressions of our grief. On one hand, I wish every person who dies could have a detailed personal biography told by an unbiased reporter. Someone who could tell the stories of loves won and lost, hobbies fulfilled or fruitlessly attempted, children who were raised against the odds of single parenthood to be exceptional people, the countless charitable works that went unsung in true Christian fashion. On the other hand, I wish people would stop placing crosses along roadsides where loved ones have been killed. In my mind, cemeteries are the appropriate places for these displays. Yet, when I visit cemeteries, I am dismayed to see that some grave sites have become the repository for all kinds of kitsch and clutter, certainly not the places of understated repose my grandmother would have approved.

I have a lot of personal bias to ponder when it comes to the rituals of dying. So far all I have learned is that each of us deals with the frustrating inevitability of death differently. I prefer not to make a public display of my grief. I hold it in my heart with the memories of the departed I wish I never had to bid good-bye.

And now that I have let it be known that I hold petty judgment against others whose expressions of grief differ from my own, I will hold my tongue, and I will strive with all the compassion I can muster not to gauge the grief of others by my own limited experiences.

Perhaps there are no standards any more. Perhaps the new normal is that there is no normal. I’ll get over it, or I won’t. That’s my burden to bear.