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the archive(s):
issue no. 5:
My Obituaries / J D Smith
My reading turns more and more to the obituaries.
For the time being my motives aren't my father's practical ones of seeing which visitations he must attend, or where flowers must be sent.
Nor do I want to dwell on death and hear, behind the rattle of newsprint, the bell tolling for me, or anyone else. I don't have any money in a dead pool, and my grudges don't go that deep.
For the most part, I'm driven by simple curiosity. There is no other way to find out about many lives that were well spent. In the winner-take-all culture one is either a celebrity or nobody. Nobody in particular, at least. Countless high-school valedictorians, myself included, and millions who went to a college that was not of their choice have spent untold hours ashamed that they haven't made their millions and appeared on television to talk about it. (Being a celebrity, on the other hand, means never having to say you're sorry.)
We would be entitled to our respective senses of failure if the glory of the world were available for every pursuit. But fame, even more wealth, consistently attaches itself to only a few activities: sports, entertainment, politics. The possibilities thin out quickly after that.
For most, the only way to make news in their profession is to dishonor it; the world's most famous doctor is arguably Jack Kevorkian. Exceptional talent in arcane and specialized areas brings a sort of fame, but one that rarely translates to the culture at large, and even more rarely lasts. Try naming every Nobel laureate in physics for the last five years, or America's most respected herpetologist.
In one sense this is as it should be. News‹novelty, the deviant‹means the ripples on the surface of existence and not the surface itself. Many of us read about criminals and celebrities, sometimes at once, precisely because they differ from us, and maybe even in unfathomable ways. Trying to fathom them helps pass a long winter's evening: human nature as parlor game. Sounding the motives of a suburban family head or a city shopkeeper presents fewer difficulties because those motives are largely our own and, as a result, make sense.
Still, it's hard to apply directly much of what we learn about the famous. Truisms about persistence, hard work, and honoring one's gifts come to mind, but these messages are more readily imparted by a sound upbringing. Jackie Chan's biography offers few lessons to a young mechanical engineer, and Nicholas Cage may not provide much of an example to a mid-career pharmacist.
Better instruction comes from lives that aren't too far from our own, their notable achievements, and the grace of their trajectories, known only at their end. Their unique passing, rather than their routine days, makes news.
But the attempt to summarize what has passed from our midst reveals outlines, textures, defining acts. Those whose faces we never knew, or passed by on the street in total anonymity, whose names flicker by like a quickly scrolled film credit, remain with us as the performer of worthwhile but little-publicized deeds. One man, born in my hometown of Aurora, Illinois, died in his nineties near Washington after a career as the CIA's chief cartographer. Another, full of years, went to Abraham's bosom after a life that began in Germany, passed through England, and ended in New York. In his 8.6 decades he became the dean of American oil economists. (Who would think of them as having a dean? How many knew there even were oil economists?) Yet another man compiled a resume that could be found in the Second World War generation but none since, because we are overspecialized, timid, or both. He held a general's rank in the Army Air Corps and, while engaged in transforming to an independent branch of service, persuaded the Defense Department to procure its first computer. Later, as a General Mills executive, he was credited with originating the cursive-script "G" that is synonymous with its products. That alone would be plenty for most lifetimes: G is just one letter, but most writers would give any body part of a matching set to have their work as well known as a Cheerios box. A fourth man's life work went into his own business, which made and repaired motors for escalators and elevators. For the end-user of technology, such as myself, who usually takes the mechanical world as no less given than clouds and tides, his career offers/provides an entree into the complexities of engineering and commerce - a cross-section of the beehive. A fifth man, a plumber a little before serious money reached his trade, and long after, found his second vocation in philanthropy. One can picture his days and nights as an alternation between overalls and black tie, monkey-wrench and check-signing pen. A sixth person, a woman, interrupted in mid-life an art career to attend law school and eventually become a judge.
There could be, should be, more women, but as a man I notice, and keep score against, other men's lives. Besides, the void into which more women's names would fit speaks more eloquently of their privation than any conscience-stricken, guilty effort to bring gender equity into this list. Those women's lives that will not register on our crude meters of renown but remain worthwhile in roles other than those of wife and mother will only increase, and they will speak for themselves.
An obituary is only an outline of a life, traced most often under the most favorable light. Obituaries of all but the truly famous rarely meet the standards of objectivity demanded elsewhere in journalism. A taboo on speaking ill of the dead, unless ill is their principal legacy, edits out a cantankerous old age or cowardice in the face of terminal illness. Self-pity, drinking problems, and sexual missteps are blotted out in secular absolution. Remaining are the treatments and deeds, donations and rescues that the deceased carried out without exceptional luck, exceptional talent, or both. The dearly departed played the cards they were dealt, and often played them well. If the sum of human endeavor could be tallied with an agreed-upon set of fictions, like gross domestic products, the works of these obscure dead would each add an iota or two rather than subtract. I look over their curricula vitae during finite days in which I know by lack of will, lack of talent, or the sheer passage of time that the possibilities, the allegedly golden opportunities for earth-shaking achievement are increasingly unlikely. The Nobel Prize and the genius grant become more unlikely all the time. Those laurels never found their way to the deceased, either, who got over it, or never cared to begin with and went about their business. I take wisdom wherever I can find it‹the need outweighs the urge to scruple at the source‹and with it I turn to what is left of my life.
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