When my parents entered what we knew would be their last few years, my sisters asked me to write their obituaries. This wasn't a premature request. We knew that writing them under pressure, immediately after their deaths, would be emotionally difficult. So, I agreed, preferring to do the task sooner than later. And I felt I had an idea of how to write one, having read more than a few lately.
Let me say here that my reading obituaries isn't some morbid habit. I'm at the age where friends are starting to go, and when I hear that another one has died, I head for the Internet to find out more. Although reading them makes me wonder at my own prospects, I can't help myself. I'm naturally curious.
When I sat down to write my father's obituary, I was stumped. It wasn't because I couldn't condense his 95 years into a few hundred words. That would be easy—as an interviewer for magazines, winnowing out the chaff is what I do. Instead, it was the nature of our relationship: a fractured, many-splintered thing. For most of my life, I'm sad to say, I feared him. (My mother's obituary, on the other hand, was a breeze; I loved her without reservation.)
Maybe "fear" is too strong a word or maybe not the right word. He wasn't physically abusive, unless getting spanked with a belt counts. (Our culture was different then.) But the evidence: I avoided him when he came home from work, celebrated when he had to work on a weekend, and wept when he disciplined me, especially when I thought he was unfair, which I felt was most of the time.
In writing an obituary, the first thing you do is harvest the facts. If your personal history is entangled with that of the subject, you need to shake away the emotions. It is in this process that writing leads to seeing.
My father, a middle-child of seven in a bustling Arkansas family, loved a dog when he was young. One day, his father, a country doctor always busy with patients, handed him a rifle and said, "You need to shoot that dog—you're getting too close to it."
During World War II, after having just turned 18, he and his brother enlisted. His brother joined the Army and never left the States. My father, on the other hand, joined the Marines. He ended up spending harrowing weeks under fire in the Battle of Iwo Jima. A photo of him on Guam, taken afterward, shows the classic "thousand-yard stare."
After my parents married, it was my mother who always got a job first. My father followed, from Arkansas and Mississippi to North Carolina and then to New Jersey. It wasn't until I was a teenager that he was able to secure employment before her, and that was only because his best friend from work convinced him to go into business with him.
But it wasn't long before he and his best friend fell out. "Never go into business with a friend," he told me.
If this brief summary sounds like his life was full of misery, it wasn't. He had a good marriage. He and my mother never clashed, relished each other's company and provided unwavering support. Although he got only a couple of weeks vacation each year, he enjoyed traveling home to visit family. (And this was Southern-style visiting: an afternoon-long affair in the cool shade of a patio, sipping iced tea and telling family tales.) But he also cherished solitary time. At his in-laws' farm in Mississippi, he took long rambles, often with his pistol to shoot snakes. He liked woodworking and built an entertainment console; he liked photography and was an early adopter of the Polaroid camera; he liked gardening and started geraniums in the winter under pink grow lights in the basement.
And he fathered three children, one boy and two girls. We all turned out just fine, so he must have been a good parent.
My first draft was an honest attempt, but the problems in our relationship sprouted like invasive weeds. After reading it, my sisters suggested I might want to reconsider a couple of passages. I rewrote it several times, and it wasn't until a late draft that I finally began to see my father truly. He was, trite as it sounds, only human—and his failings should not have been barriers to my loving him.
After I'd finished and filed away his obituary, he said he wanted to write a book about his experience in the war. At first, he mailed me pages of notes, which I gladly typed up and sent back for review. Not long after that, his eyes began to fail as a result of macular degeneration, and his handwriting, already spidery, consequently became mite-like and illegible. So we decided that I would interview him on my visits and record audio. But by then, his voice was also failing—it had become a mere, whispery husk of the deep voice I remembered from my childhood—and the recordings were almost inaudible. Even so, I was able to pick through the recordings and print them out in a large font for him to proof. Unfortunately, at this time, his memories of the war began to shift, and this worried him. After he was gone, I was able to correct most mis-rememberings through research; but whether his buddy Harlan was one person or an amalgam, we may never know.
For me, those times we spent together working on his book helped compensate for all those years of a fractured relationship. In a sense, it became an extension of his obituary, a deeper tribute, and our time together in writing it opened my eyes.
(If you're interested, his book, I Remember Iwo Jima, is available through Amazon.)
Thank you for sharing your experience Michael. My father died suddenly while I was visiting him in England so writing his obituary was a difficult, messy and emotional business. My mother is now 91 and I know that I should start writing her obituary now, so that I can clearly say what I really need to say. But while putting pen to paper is necessary, it also means accepting the inevitable and that is very difficult, despite her advanced age. Your article has reminded me that I should start writing it anyway!