Habitual Obituaries

A recent book by Marilyn Johnson entitled The Dead Beat: Lost souls, lucky stiffs and the perverse pleasures of obituaries chronicles the life and times of an avid obituary writer. The excerpt on her website describes the thrilling emotional roller coaster ride of waiting for one of her famous subjects to wade into the great hereafter. Her reviewers describe her as exhibiting reverence for life and death, yet this appetite for famous last words seems little different than the medias voracious appetite for paparazzi character assasinations. Nonethless, I admit that I too am fascinated by obituaries recently, though perhaps not for the same reasons as Ms. Johnson.

A colleague of mine at Carleton College, Lillian Waluconis, died recently, having succumbed unexpectedly to a liver ailment she had long suffered. Although she was a member of my graduating class, I admit that I never knew her. In fact, on a campus of fewer than 2200 students, I never even met her. Seeing her photo in the school newspaper, I couldn't even place her face. I'm not real socialite myself, but based on my inability to recognize Lilly, I assumed she was one of the many unwashed agoraphobes holding court in the basement of Sci-Fi house, gorging herself to death on Dungeons and Dragons matches and reruns of Red Dwarf. Then, I read her obituary. Lilly may not have had an abundance of acquaintances, but she was a delightful young woman with a handful of friends who adored her. Her employers in Campus Activities, a central unit of Carleton social life, in fact, treasured her as a diligent and cheerful worker. Lilly not only left behind friends on campus, but friends in Japan where she spent one year studying traditional Japanese artforms. Had she survived, she would have been married this summer. Like so many of my peers, hers was a life full of promise. That this life was so hastily snuffed out is more than shocking, it is the sort of tragedy that forces even the best, brightest, and furthest from death to ponder the inevitable. This is the sort of obituary that resonates with me.

The shadow of death hung with me in the wake of Lillian's passing. More than an acute sense of my own mortality, however, she left me wondering about what my own obituary might look like. Lillian's friends set up a livejournal website to honor her memory (something I find much more vital than some distant onlooker's take on a life lived and lost), and many of the posts lament the fact that they feel they never really knew Lilly. Cutepooface sums up the sentiment nicely: "I wish that everyone could have been on the [Japan] program, that everyone could see and feel what I felt. I wish Lily could have touched each and everyone of you like she touched me." Were I to die, would people say that they regret not having had the chance to really know me?

I admit that what bothered me most about Lillian's death was not that she had left behind so many friends (or so few, depending on how you look at it), family, and a fiancé, but that she had left her senior thesis unfinished. According to her faculty advisor, her thesis "centered on how Japanese social studies textbooks deal with the Shinto and Buddhist religions." This is a remarkable piece of new knowledge! Will this too die with Lillian? Would it be inappropriate to finish the work that she started? When someone dies, we distribute amongst family and friends the material possessions that the deceased have left, but we forget to carry-on the work they have begun and left unfinished. Or, is it only the work of celebrities that is deemed worthy of posthumous release?