I wrote my week. I often do so once a year; it has a kind of .
I’ve met a few others who do the same or something . A teacher I know likes to start every new year by writing her obituary or what she hopes it will like by year’s end. Another friend writes hers on Rosh Hashana. Recently a close friend wrote his life story as part of the to get on the kidney waiting , and it to me that’s exactly what their resembled: a living obituary.
The first time I wrote my obituary, I was 12 years old. This was not a school assignment or a dramatic .
My mother was as a at our , and she was to write her own obituary, an imaginative exercise as preparation to with terminally ill . This assignment was enough to some to quit the , but my mother stuck with it, and the idea sparked with me .
At the dinner , my and I talked over my mother’s assignment to help her brainstorm. Later that night, I in bed out my own. My aunt, a reporter and , gave me my first a few years earlier, and it felt like a extension of my .
I the format of my mother’s assignment: the facts, age and home; survivors; in or school; and , , or how people might remember me.
My mother to in hospice for the next 20 years, and I to write my obituary on a mostly annual , after she stopped . As I grew to that every my mother met would soon die, some hours of their meeting and others after months, I also came to that most people outside our house could not tolerate talking much about , their own.
The of this obituary writing is not as as it might . If you take a few minutes to try it, you might find the same. In about a page or so, I usually end up with a of the year, held all the past ones. I many of the accomplishments that felt precious one year were hardly a mention the next.
Some years are short and ; some swell with joy and hope, . There is a in the accumulation, like the stacking of — daughter, wife, mother of one, mother of two. And owning up to the unstacking, too, such as divorces, difficult moves, disruptions and the of others in your life.
In years that feel , sometimes I’ll write an obituary. Imagining I’ve lived to 94, I’ll a Ph.D. behind my name, maybe a lottery win, a huge to my library. Though the most — I got my ’s license! I went on an dig! I owned a country house on the of ! — tick off accomplishments and accumulations quickly before down into the of it: who and what are left behind.
Certain years have passed without my being able to come to the page for this exercise in any form: the year after September 2001 (I was in the World Trade Center the day of the attacks), more the hardest years of my marriage and divorce. I could not write my obituary at all in the thick of the pandemic; as a to two kids, the of that me in the spring of 2020 clouded my to myself enough for what no felt like an exercise.
When I returned to the , the space of 24 months felt and . I had the of writing a black hole. Work and had been by the of or dough , the of my son’s hair or the changing color of my own, different ways of keeping time.
Most years, though, writing my obituary brings a kind of . While obituaries are traditionally public , meant to , them into my gave me a to a more intimate . This private wasn’t on newsworthiness or fact. When I flip my old obituaries, I am flipping past of myself. In many ways, they are as good as , unreachable selves, and I find in being able to say hello.
This year writing my obituary felt more than . I perhaps my younger son’s his teeth had me or maybe the anxiety swirl of the election was clouding the . But in writing that first line — always my name and age of — I : I was about to be 48, the same age as my aunt, the one who gave me my first , when she died. And at 14, my oldest son was my age when I her. That she meant so much to me in such a short time gives me a hope I didn’t know I needed.
In the documentary “Obit,” about the obituary of The New York Times, the reporter Margalit Fox says, “Obituaries have next to nothing to do with and everything to do with life.” It that we wait until after our to write them and never get to read them ourselves. Writing your obituary while you’re still can offer about your life and, mercifully, if you find something , you still have time to .
I’m my mother brought the of at this way to the dinner all those decades ago and to do so all the stories of her dying after that. Just as my aunt taught me the of keeping a , my mother’s exercise taught me the and of holding close, so I could remember to live.