On Writing an Obituary

For my grandfather who called us goose.

To write an obituary, one is generally advised to start with the basic facts: name, age, date and place of birth, and death. Then, share their life story: significant events, achievements, services, memorial gifts, in 750 words or less. Finally, proofread carefully and consider involving family members for a more personal touch.

Proofread carefully. Consider involving family members for a more personal touch. 750 words or less.

Papers like the Bangor Daily News, charge $1.25 per word for the first 325 words and $0.75 per word for each additional word. The Portland Press Herald, where this particular obituary was published at 1:01 on Saturday, charges 59 cents per word, with a minimum charge of $15.

Until Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the 1400s, obituaries were primarily for the notable. Notable meaning the rich. Today, you still must be willing to pay more for each word—or else distill further a life onto paper. Between my finger and my thumb the pen rests, digging. The delicate words of my Aunt Anne cross the page. My mother and I in our meddling try to squeeze in round-about-emotions, but what about this, and this, and this? She brings us back quietly and in her graceful way, helps us to see that there will be more words to be said. Together, we find balance between fact and feeling.

In the morning I found that the lilac bushes had burst into a sunlit absence. Below the rock-wall where the peach tree once stood, felled. And, in the long afternoon, I felt love where the rooted weeds are raising the rocked slabbed patio, my grandfather here and there, and everywhere. He was there as I drove up the coast towards Monhegan—an osprey in front of my windshield, swooping back into the sky as I skittered across the Sheepscot River. In the house: geese prints on the wall, and his voice resounding, goose, goose, to my mother and me. And the voice-mail—Hi zozo, just calling to say hello. Give me a call back when you have a chance. Sending my love.

There is also this, our last conversation: the state of the cellar, paint chips on the front window, the minerality of the water, weathering on the backside of the barn, and how he had 300 dollars’ worth of Amazon points that somebody ought to use. He was happy, he said that I had come home to Maine.

Soon, I will drive across the country with my mother and his ashes. My family will scatter him in the field outside the Montsweag house, abutting the brackish water. In the fall, I will bring him out to an island in the Channel so he can be with my grandmother. Others will bring him into salt bays, and down rivers and up mountains. But not yet. We are still in that strange, middling ground where the logistics of dying supersede the ability to think, and his legacy—written from our tentative sloping hands — is printed in this past Saturday's paper.

In writing an obituary one cannot help but think of legacy, of what it is to inherit one— how to begin to carry it forward. My grandfather was an educator, a Mainer, a thinker, a banjo player, an adventurer, a listener. A man who knew how to live a life guided by the principles of place. To be grounded in place is a strange thing, it is a quality of force. His vocabulary is my vocabulary. His land, our land. How can I come to carry it?

A friend of mine framed it to me as a particular combination of mythology & ethos that can whittle right into the soul. He believes that once you have it, you can sense when you depart - that by holding steady through the pressure, you can always find your way home. I would like to believe he is right.

This is, in part, akin to what Jennifer Roberts, an art historian, states in her essay The Power of Patience:

“Just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it. Just because something is available instantly to vision does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness. Or, in slightly more general terms: access is not synonymous with learning.”

What she means by this is that to transform access into learning requires time and strategic patience. My grandfather understood this, and found a way into transformation through grounding us in the physicality of land. He not only understood the art of deceleration, but taught us the singular and very important act of paying attention.

Through this I learned all manner of useful things: how to sit quietly on a Therm-a-Rest while the lightning strikes, how to be soft in the woods when looking for chanterelles, or what it feels like to forget to look in a mirror because you’ve been in the woods too long—and, without noticing it, one’s inner and outer selves have quietly been wed back together.

As the past superimposes itself onto the present, I find an opportunity in his legacy towards forward momentum—a way out of the doubleness of contemporary life. I’d like to believe that when we allow ourselves to hear the salt marsh sing and the white pines squeak—when we do so in communion with others—that we choose to no longer be passive actors in the commerce of attention, but rather active participants in that which we call might call life.