(A candid) Obituary

Never blame anyone in life. The good people give you happiness. The worst people give you a lesson. The best people give you memories.”

Zio K. Abdelnour

Obituaries have replaced the now-extinct Christmas letters as the ultimate departure from real life fact-telling to idyllic fantasy.

Well… after whatever self-serving distorted whoppers have been issued lately from you-name-the-political party.

I know… I know, Perras. Whatever. But I have to admit that this has stuck in my craw since I read my first obituary, probably sometime soon after the Second World War.

And it especially hit home after I seemingly inherited the burden of delivering eulogies at my family’s funerals, now for too many to count: grandparents , of course, (although my father’s parents both died when he was a young child), uncles, aunts, cousins, mother, father and also a brother.

That leaves me as the family patriarch, if that word has not already been cancelled. As well as leaving my clan in a sorry state. My oldest brother, two years my senior, died in 2010. I was asked by his ex-wife and kids if I could say a few words at his funeral. Okay, of course I would. I started composing it on the way from Ottawa to Oakville, Ontario in the car as my family made its way to the burial.

To get everyone’s attention in my opening line, as all public speakers are taught to do, I opened with…. “He could be an asshole sometimes.”

My children were aghast. “You can’t say that,” the three of them opined together. “Why not?” I retorted. I must have been in one of my phases, the one where the truth as I saw it, must be told no matter what. “Because that’s not the way things are done.”

That’s all they said. Out of the mouths of babes…

I guess the willingness to speak the truth of the dead goes back to earlier, superstitious times when the prevailing wisdom was that the deceased would of course be aware of this and come back to haunt you, whether they had to make the trip from above or below. But just as I always have had more respect and admiration for someone who would admit to their mistakes and weaknesses and tell self-deprecating stories, I’d have to say that I would relate to an obituary that stared truth in its face and did not flinch. After all, we’re all in this together. Didn’t even Prince Gautama leave his young wife and newborn son to wander off for several years to seek enlightenment before being reborn as the Buddha ?

In today’s culture and society, he would have been cancelled for his self-serving abandonment of his wife and child and he and his ideas be flushed into the septic tank of history.

So here, forthwith, I leave you the life of Ordinary Joe. Any connections to anyone, living or dead, are purely coincidental and purely imaginary. The obituary will appear within the next week, unlike my usual track record of months between appearances. After all, it will be said in my own obituary, that he liked to blog, just not very often.