Somebody died today and they want you to know all about it. Pick up today's Arizona Republic and you're likely to find 50-75 recently deceased people eager to let you know about how they lived their lives. My advice: You're dead already, get over it.
The first rule of not dying an untimely death is never to make fun of dead people. Luckily, it's not the corpses that frustrate me. It's the living people that take out obituary ads. I can think of several reasons why somebody might take out such an obituary, all of which are bad.
The most used excuse to take out obituaries is to inform the friends of the deceased. Speaking as a person who will be dead someday, I would prefer the people that have no means of discovering my death outside the newspaper to stay the hell away from my funeral.
My reasons here are twofold. First, it will make them feel like jerks somewhere down the line when they ask, let's say my kids, if their dad is still slicing the ball over the golf course. I'm dead, and you're asking my kid about my golf swing? Jerk.
Second, the only thing the obituary does is inform that guy that you and your friends never liked but always came to your parties anyway about the funeral. Then all your real friends get pissed because, look, Ronald showed up. Then they jet early and it's just you and Ronald at the burial sight.
The next reason people take out obituaries is to inform the public about how great a person the deceased was. They should make the obituaries a game called "My dead relative is better than yours," because there is quite a bit of ball flexing on these pages. We could then all vote online as to who we think the person most worthy of burial is and throw the losers into the Salt River.
I had no idea dead people could be so vain. The obituary craze (as I like to call it) is indicative of a public that's only concerned with how good their lives look on paper.
If you want to put an obituary to good use, let it show the person's character. My obituary would read, "Josh Deahl is dead and he blames you. I'd tell you where the funeral is, but haven't you done enough damage?" Succinct, confusing and guilt-inducing, just like me.
Flipping to the other side of the coin, let's focus on you twisted people that read the obituaries. Most of you flip through these pages and decide whether you agree or disagree with the coming of death for the individual. If they were old or have one of those ugly pictures next to them, usually you move right on past them, looking for a tear-jerker.
I don't pretend to understand this habit, but it's sick. Of course it's sadder when a very young person dies, I don't deny that. But why on earth would you want to wake up every morning to that news? You might as well pay the paperboy to give you a punch in the crotch every morning, because your day is going to suck if you start it out this way.
The wedding and birth announcements fill up such a small fraction of the space that obituaries take that it worries me. When we find loss and death provocative, something is wrong.
But most importantly, if taking out 100 words in a newspaper is your way of honoring a lost one, try harder! You know they wouldn't like your description of them anyway, how could they in that space?
If ever there was a time to get creative and stay away from the unoriginal and mundane, it is in recognition of somebody's death. I don't want to be a few words thrown on a page,
I want to inspire some love, havoc, grave digging, something! I want something other than insincerity in my locally distributed newspaper. Have me stuffed and use me as a scarecrow for crying out loud.
Dying on paper and living on paper go hand in hand. This might sound over-dramatic, but I'm not saying obituaries are our biggest problem. I'm just saying they are one of them.
Josh Deahl is a political science and philosophy senior. Reach him at
joshua.deahl@asu.edu.
