carybrunswick.com
Do your obituary before it's too late
When I left my editor’s job at a daily newspaper years ago, I promised our news clerk that I would be sending along my obituary so she could keep it on file. That way, when the time came, all she would have to do is plug in the date. Guess what? I haven’t followed through, though I have not avoided thinking about the subject. Obituaries have changed so much over the last quarter century; I simply have not been able to decide how to write it. I know this may seem like a grim subject, and it can be, I guess, but it is something we all have to deal with at some point. You know, there are birth notices, graduations, weddings, career accolades and, eventually, obituaries. They are part of our lives.
When I studied American literature in high school back in the 1960s, the books I most enjoyed were contemporary novels about young people. Holden Caulfield in “Catcher in the Rye” seemed smart-alecky as he trudged around Manhattan, and I remember thinking at the time how wonderful it was to have to read a book that teenagers could relate to, compared to the usual dry fare of Hawthorne or Emerson. The boys attending a private school in “A Separate Peace” seemed worlds away but were our age, and the mystery surrounding a fall from a tree held our attention. Reading it was not the chore that Henry Adams was. What my classmates and I didn’t know was that those books were controversial and had been challenged or banned in some schools because of profanity and sexual references.