Obituaries are complicated pieces. How can a life be summed up in a few, expensive lines? What if the newspaper permits "Discussion" or "Comments" on an online obituary page? Can a family decline that option? Why don't obituaries usually cite the cause of death? People want to know. We know a decedent loved his family, but what did he love about his life?
A lovely woman asked me today if I have a "Caring Bridge" page. I replied "no," and I explained the blog. The blog accents what is important to me, and who mattered. Like any edited, selective work, it's the modified truth. I try not to embellish that truth. One of my favorite sayings is, "I want to get it right; I don't want to be right." I do, however, edit: sometimes people and things cut themselves out. Corners of drama and bags of anger weary my shunted patience.
About fifteen years ago, I was shopping in a "Marshall's" department store, and I caught a glimpse of my image in a mirror that wrapped one of the building supports. I was startled. For a second, I didn't think that I was the person in the mirror. I thought of myself as a spry twenty-two-year old who could earn the 1980s equivalent of "chili peppers" on ratemyprofessors.com. What I saw was a preoccupied, middle-aged woman in a shirt-waist dress.
That memory returned today when I read the piece about people trying to reconstruct family recipes. Will it taste as good as you remember it? (Ask any Lithuanian immigrant who's been in this country for more that twenty years to go back and taste the delectable Lithuanian chocolate of her youth. Blech. It tastes like a chocolated laxative!)
Can I align the past that lives in my memory with the history that the photos reveal?
When I "shake my legs," as Lithuanians say, my obituary will have one line: a link to this blog.
Champaign, Illinois, January 1981. This is the "Irene" that lives in my head: the graduate student, sitting in her monastic dorm room.
10 comments:
I still haven't quite figured out what that chubby fellow with the graying hair is doing in my mirror.
Time has an insatiable appetite for youth, does it not?
Your post about your mom, and her stay at the La Salle, sparked a google hunt that led me to discover a 1951 photo of the pastor who married my wife and me. It was the first time I saw a photo of him as a young man -- and his wife as a young woman. I was startled.
Hi Peter, thanks for visiting.
My Mom and I had a conversation about this topic yesterday, and that was one of the factors that prompted this post.
Well, that early 80s Irene undoubtedly deserved some chili peppers, but so does the 21st century Irene. Remember, my dear, there are many kinds of chili peppers. Some will rip your lips off; others are smoky and smooth and will warm your heart.
*smooch*
I remember visiting my mom for the last few years in the nursing home. As I started talking with the other residents I found that inside, they were all the spry twenty-somethings of their past. It was all at once sad, alarming, and inspiring. It gave me a new perspective, and a new understanding and respect for the aging process as I quickly join the ranks.
I've thought about this too. I am now over 60 years old, older than my father was when he died, just a few years younger than my grandmother who died at 65. I told my children that inside, I'm still 18 or 20 or 30, depending on the day and my mood. I do not think of myself any older than that.
I sometimes have to remind myself that it's often not okay to act as though I were eighteen.
(Except at home.)
I don't see where the difference exists. A beauty then, a beauty now!
The infamous Sherman Hall sliding bed/couch thingy! They were still using these as late as 2001. That hall reminded me of a very very low security prison.
Sherman Hall was a good grad dorm because there wasn't much to do in the room but study. If I pulled the bed out, its edge touched the desk. The room must have been about 8 feet wide and 12 feet long. I used to smoke cigarettes back then, and the smell lingered. The basement laundry room was especially unpleasant.
I moved to an apartment (on Main Street, in Urbana) the following year, and I regreted the decision because I never was as focused as I had been in Sherman Hall.
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