The Tribune

by DIANE PHILLIPS

I don’t mean to sound gruesome, but let’s be honest with ourselves and with each other. Some of the rituals around dying and how we remember the dead could use a good reset.

Take the obituaries, for example. The Thursday papers are the most popular editions in print. There was a time when they carried the pages of food coupons and City Market and Super Value would vie for the most enticing prices on chicken, rice, flour and a loaf of bread. But even after those coupon days ended, the Thursday paper remained the biggest print run because demand continued unabated. We wanted to see the obituaries. We NEED to see the obituaries. Our curiosity won’t let us rest until we know who went to rest since we checked last week. We want to know, as my late mother-in-law used to say, who died who never died before. So we scour the obits that are insanely popular but what did we really learn about the individual? Virtually nothing that they had anything to do with doing. We learned who they were related to.

In the 88 Death Notices (hope I got that right as I really do not want to have to recount) that appeared in Thursday’s Tribune, for instance, and the seven In Loving Memory or Cards of Thanks in the front section, what I learned about 99 percent of the people whose faces stared at me from the pages of black and white ink is that they had an awful lot of family. Some also had a lot of friends. We don’t know where they worked, how long they were married if they were, what they liked to do. They are faces with relatives, not people with lives. Only in the Loving Memory section did we learn that someone had a kind heart, thank heavens, that was a relief.

Two people I highly respect and consider dear to my heart run funeral homes so I hope they do not take offence but the way we treat obituaries in The Bahamas is lazy. It’s not their fault. We need to be thinking about our own obituaries before we are the subject of one. Instead, we leave it up to the funeral home or director and they ask the family for a photo at a time the family is overcome with grief. We send them scurrying through images on a phone hoping there is a picture that captures their loved one in just the right light and mood and without a palm tree growing out of the back of their head that we did not notice when took the photo. Or we shovel through crammed drawers pulling out something from ages ago that we loved back then but now the dead person is 84 and they were 22 in the photo but we give it to the funeral home anyway because it’s a good picture.

The New York Times has obituary writers. They have drawers (or the equivalent of drawers in filing cabinets) filled with obituaries of people who haven’t died yet so they can be ready when they do. It’s not about who their second cousin by their aunt who would have married their grandfather except they married the other brother instead was. It’s about them. Who they are. What they did. What they stand for. The obits are tributes to a life well-lived not a recitation of relatives, some of whom they haven’t seen and might not recognise if they did.

I confess I have a special place in my heart for how people are described in print when they pass. When I was 15, I got my first newspaper job, riding my bike around town to pick up pictures of people who died and then interviewing the family, talking with the editor who knew everyone in what was then a very small town, and writing the obit. I also wrote about birthdays so that will tell you how small the town was. The paper came out once a week and birthdays and obituaries were an important part. I guess it would also help to mention that the town was so small there was no crime so that allowed more space for things like describing the happy and fulfilled life of a now dead person.

The other part of the obit ritual that is way overdue for a reset is how a person looks in the photo that accompanies what appears in print. We just don’t think about it while we are alive, figuring someone else will figure it out when we’re gone. That’s a lot of trust and also a lot of responsibility to lay on someone in a time of turmoil or despair. Even those of us who are careful and prudent about having a Will don’t bother to think about who will be in charge of that Thursday lasting impression.

Given that we have our hair done for one special evening, a birthday dinner, a gala, a fund-raiser, a baby’s christening or a teen’s Bas Mitzvah, why wouldn’t we get all dolled up for the photo we want to appear in our obits? Maybe there should be obit photographers like wedding photographers? It could be a whole new profession. The perfect pic may not need to be formal, but it should show the sparkle in our eyes and the warmth we exude. Why leave our last look to fate? As they say, ‘You never get a second chance to make a first impression’, and surely you don’t get a do-over when that obit photo of you that is the last picture in the world you would have chosen for the lasting impression the world has of you.

Pretending death will not come does not displace the reality that it will. Your last impression is too important to generations to come to ignore it, pretending it won’t happen if we don’t think about it. Yep, time to shake up the obit ritual. Let’s get personal in the Death Notice, share stories and give families and friends that true sense of individual that drives us all to the Thursday papers every week.