Anyone who has to write an obituary for me one day will probably say, 'She did absolute depths of agony really well.' I'm not, however, an unhappy person.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I never wanted to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary notices I have read with pleasure.
I always wondered what hearing one's own obituary might sound like, and I sort of feel like I may have just heard part of it at least.
My grandmother was a very tough woman. She buried three husbands and two of them were just napping.
It's really sort of morbid, but she said her mother wanted to see me all her life. And when she died, she made just one request: that a picture of me be put into her casket. So somewhere in England, I'm in a casket.
For years following the death of my mother, I wanted to write about her. I started writing what I thought of as personal essays about growing up as her child, but I never could finish any of them. I think I was too close to that loss, and too eager to try and resolve things, to make her death make sense.
I don't think most people know what's going to be in their obituary, but I do.
I was terribly wounded by my wife's death.
My mother Molly had a nervous breakdown after my father Chic died, aged 50. He was a very generous man who ran a shop in Dundee giving a lot of people tick. When he died, a lot of people hadn't paid their bills, so he died with a lot of debt. After he died, my mother went doolally.
My wife Cecily Adams was dying of cancer, my daughter Madeline was struggling to overcome an autism diagnosis, and my father was dying, all at the same time. Writing the journal was a cathartic experience, and an extremely positive one.
Beyond being timely, an obituary has a more subjective duty: to assess its subject's impact.
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