| |
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
N OT MY FAVORITE
I have found that most people I know gave up reading the Obituary column in their local newspaper some years ago.
They, at one time, used to “check it out” as a routine of getting ready to go to work. Someone, at least, glanced at the list our local paper ran in the lower, left-hand corner of the front page. Names appearing on that list could modify our work day. We followed that pattern for many years – into our fifties, perhaps, but then got out of the habit of doing so, when we came to feel that people were not dying off as fas as they had been previously. The truth came quickly. The harsh reality was that “our old crowd out there” was getting scarce. Many of us could imagine our own names being set type in type for the list and we made jokes about it. “If you see my name there some morning...give me a call...I want to be among the first to know about it.”
Later, at my age, for instance, one begins to read the obits again but this
time for the rest of the family. It is interesting to mention a name and to watch and hear young people talk – often for the first time - talk about someone they “knew. They have to find out how to speak of former friends in past tense terms. One does not lose closeness quickly.
For a time such remembered bits are usually serious references to the persons capabilities and as we come to realize more and more what is or her life meant in ours we tend to lighten upon somewhat and see their lives in a larger framework. This entire piece came this morning because I read a well-done obituary in the Harrisonburg Daily “News-Record” honoring a man - a husband and a father – whom I did not know, but wish now I had done so.
It was an average obituary in many ways – not overdone, not too long yet detailed enough to show he was a man respected by his peers; a hunter, fisherman, gardener, a member of four social and religious groups. He was a WW II veteran who worked in the nation's largest shipyard. He was born in Mowers, WV in 1924. He is buried at Yorktown, Va.
One line, inserted just before the closing lines of information about ceremony times and places – almost as if it originated as a last-minute after-thought which ought to be there.
It read: “We shall miss his stubborn streak and his ability to make us laugh.”
Andrew McCaskey amccsr@adelphia.net 8-16-06 [c451wds]
|
|
