Obituary 10.12.1988
Johnstone Flemming’s obituary has finally been released. Printed two weeks after his passing, it is the most uncompromisingly ambitious and true-to-life account of life ever catalogued within the 300 word limit of the Sun or the New Times or the Sentinel. It is transcendent: a life described with such accuracy becomes authentic and corporeal beyond the most reality-affirming lived moments.
Johnstone Flemming strove for a noble life. He demanded a heightened existence capable of standing up to the ineffable forces that rot corpses and evolve language. He lived every detail of his person toward the devoted belief that in retrospect the fragments of his life would fall into perfect arrangement, effortlessly crafting themselves into a true, dynamic, perennial whole. The ultimate description of his existence was to require no premeditated formula of “a life” (e.g. birth, marriage, death), for each lived sentence was to support the following without any intentional creation or re-telling.
Johnstone, in his typical fashion, was quiet about his desires; to speak openly would have contaminated the authenticity and potential of his project. He declined to talk about his life while he was living, for it was still a work in progress. The world beyond him caught few glimpses of this project — only from the rare moments when Flemming would make notes in front of strangers before tucking them into a folder to add to the newest draft of his obituary.
Flemming’s timeless quest ceased in a final moment of acceptance. He saw his life for what it was: a series of descriptions; a pale, dimensional guess at what life could be. His failure to achieve his goal of unifying literature and life released into a single instant of immutable truth: his last breath echoed every unwritten perfection of the narrative he had pursued relentlessly since birth.
The collection of approximately 500 of Johnstone’s most recent auto-obituaries were reduced to ashes in the fire that consumed Johnstone, 82, and his beloved parrot Aniel, 4. Flemming’s brother-in-law provided the Sentinel with this early unfinished draft of his obituary, which we have published unedited. He is survived by his sister, Mary, his brother-in-law, Jaden, and their son, Edwin.
