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.
