My Own Obituary

So here I sit, watching the Sabres game with Rick and the kids, and they do a moment of silence for Richard Martin.  We didn’t know what happened to him, so I Googled it (seriously, what on earth did we do before Google?!).  Apparently, he died suddenly of a heart attack while driving today – thirty minutes before the obituary was posted online.  I couldn’t believe even the Canadian press could get something written and published so fast, but Rick pointed out that newspapers have obituaries written for most famous people in advance and that they update them monthly, so that when someone dies they just have to stick in the most recent developments/details and can go immediately to publication.  I said I didn’t know what to write about in the blog lately so maybe I’d write my own obituary – Rick said that every writing class he’s ever taken has made him do that, so it seems like a more-than-valid exercise in writing, so here I go.

Jill-Elizabeth died earlier today of a massive heart attack while sleeping peacefully in her bed in her palatial Aruban beach house.  The 101 year-old author, philanthropist, inventor and helicopter pilot is perhaps best known for her 2011 breakout first novel Just Plain Wrong, which introduced the world to the intertwining lives of seven criminals each guilty of perpetrating their revenge crimes against the wrong people.  The novel went platinum in just two weeks in the United States.  The novel’s global sales, sequels, movie-rights, tie-in merchandise, and television series residuals allowed her to establish the Jill-Elizabeth Foundation, dedicated to helping recovering Corporate Americans rejoin the human race.  Her subsequent thirty-seven novels, fourteen short story collections, and innumerable articles and speeches allowed her to expand her philanthropic outreach through the establishment of the Franclefoundation, dedicated to providing scientific research grants to promote the development of fat- and cholesterol-free bacon products.

Teehee.

And there I got stuck.  I could not figure out what to write next – gave it a lot of thought, and came up with nothing.  Zip, zero, zilch.  See, it’s one thing to imagine how one would die and joke about the massively impressive things one would like to accomplish before one did.  I mean, wouldn’t it be great to have enough money to establish not one but two foundations dedicated to supporting things one believed in and/or loved (and yes, Lynna, of course you can run one of them.  Or both.  Your call.  :))  And wouldn’t it be even better to get one’s first book published the same year one started writing it?  And wouldn’t it be better still to have dozens of subsequent fabulous publications and be in demand to give speeches on any topic one chose?  All those things would be great and fun and wondrous and are cool to think about.  It’s also surprisingly nice to imagine a peaceful, non-scary way to die at a ripe old age.  What is not at all nice to imagine and where I found myself stuck is in imagining the people I would leave behind – or equally bad, the people that might have already left me behind?  How do you write the “She is survived by…” part of your own obituary without getting maudlin, morbid, or morose?

Hm, she said.

So I sat and I thought.  And sat and thought.  And…  (you get the picture)

And eventually I came up with something.  Hopefully, my obituary will be a little longer than this first test-run – full of more cool and impressive achievements (like inventing a magic tool for getting eggshell out of cracked eggs in a bowl, holding the world record for number of books read in a year, single-handedly bringing back paisley, or establishing the limerick as a valid literary art form) and a host of awards and honorary titles (like First Lady of Fiction, Empress of Her Reading Chair, or Queen of the Library).  If it is not though, that is ok.  Because I know now how I would like it to end: “She is survived by a lot of people who liked her, a bunch of people who loved her, a smattering of people who respected her, and a few people who really knew her.  She will be missed.”