Final Notice

I was reading the obituaries today (I was not looking for myself!) and it was very sad to realize that someone's entire life could be summed up in a paragraph or two. The schools we attended, the jobs we've held, clubs and organizations we belonged to - that's not our life. Our lives are the daily, mind-numbing events we finally manage to live through.

I guess we can't put all that stuff in an obituary. If you managed to live a long life, it would take a huge manuscript to contain it all. My life has been full of stuff and I'm sure you don't want to read about it. All of my disappointments, failures and regrets. The things I meant to do but never got around to doing. The trips we had planned to take but never had the time or the money (or both). What about the big beautiful new home we were going to build up on the hill? Never happened. Never will, now. There are more disillusionments that make up my life, but that's life !

Thrown into the mix are all the great and wonderful things that have happened. Luckily, there have been many, many more great and wonderful things than unhappy things. All the things that were wonderful for me as a child, a teenager, a young married woman, a mother and now, a grandmother are too plentiful to publish. It would take me more than 60 years to write them all down.

So, how do you condense a life-time of events to a paragraph or two? Who really cares that you were the President of such-and-such a club? Who cares that you won this or that award? If you didn't know me while I was living, do you really care, now that I'm dead? I don't think so.

Unfortunately, I've seen a lot of obituaries of my friends and relatives. None of them do justice to the person I knew. None of them speak of their funny sense of humor, or how comfortable I felt when I was with them. No mention of that 3rd grade incident that we talked and laughed about for years! How about that time in high school when we all .... (fill in the blanks). We've all got a ton of memories but none of that gets mentioned.

I just think it's sad.