March 14, 2008
Editing
According to Webster’s New Collegiate, an obituary (L. obitus = deceased) is a “notice of a person’s death usu.(sic) with a short biographical account.” I am not all that sure what is a biographical account of a death, whatever length, but our town’s papers charge by the word, anyway, so the shorter, I suppose, the better.
I mention this because CP decided recently that we should probably get about writing our own obituaries while we are still able and more or less coherent, and that we shouldn’t be leaving them up to somebody else who maybe was not all that well informed. I think she probably read this in some AARP or Church Pension Group material. Furthermore, neither should their length matter whatever the charge, she said, as we’d more than likely be paying for each other’s, sort of, you might say, like as a last tribute.
Somehow, I didn’t exactly get right on it as she didn’t seem to be doing much about hers either. I wondered whether my being older than the hills might have had something to do with her procrastination. Anyhow, I finally went ahead and wrote mine.
Even though I had heard that a newspaper’s obituaries are usually written by youngsters just out of journalism school, I took the New York Times as an example, presuming they’d probably hired the better students. But that didn’t prove all that helpful because when I compared the “short biographical account” of my death to their typical and longer ones, I got rather depressed when it dawned on me how little I had accomplished and what little influence I had had in all these years. Finally, and not all that easily, I got something done. I ran it through my printer and left a copy on CP’s desk without comment.
Several days went by, and I began to wonder had she seen it or maybe had she even read it if she had. After all, it had been her idea in the first place, and I was rather proud that I had coöperated at all, for it hadn’t been all that easy. Finally, I asked.
Yes, she’d read it, she said. Well? I said. Well, she said, You left a lot out, so I took the blue pencil to it. (The kind editors are said to use, I suppose.) When she began to tell me what I’d left out, I was overjoyed. I didn’t know she’d remembered. It was almost like a second honeymoon, save for the editing part, the purpose, and all.
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