Life Story

[This is an adaptation of something I read at the Arizona National Memorial Cemetery on February 28, 2013.]

This is about life stories.

Everybody knows that obituaries are about death, but they aren’t, not really. They’re about life. They’re the stories of lives.

On February 1, I sat in my parents’ living room and wrote my dad’s obituary for my hometown newspaper. Dad had died only about an hour before. I got the call as I was driving home from the hospice, from my mom.

“Jason,” my mom said. “He’s gone.”

The past week has been difficult for those who loved him to watch as he struggled with pneumonia and some serious lung, heart, and kidney complications. Earlier that day, at the advice of his doctors, we moved him to a hospice, hoping he could have some peace. The hospice was everything the hospital wasn’t: warm, organic, with the smells of home instead of the cold, hard, sterile world of the hospital.

In our few hours at the hospice, they made us grilled cheese sandwiches. My mom and I ate them next to his bed as he slept.

My sister arrived to relieve me; I was going back to my parents’ house to get some sleep. Less than an hour later, as I was almost at their driveway, my mom called to tell me he had died.

Now I was sitting in their empty house and staring at the web site of the Union Democrat, Sonora’s hometown newspaper.

I had thought about writing my dad’s obituary for years. Flowery ones, understated ones, you name it. But I never wrote it. The time will come, I thought to myself. And now the time had come.

Being an editor, I tried to match the newspaper’s format.

Most of these stories go as you’d expect. When and where someone died. A list of their survivors. Some key dates.

But most of the obituaries in the paper had one paragraph that was intended to go beyond that litany of names and dates. It described interests, hobbies, passions, personal details.

If the names of our parents and children, the dates of our birth and death, are the front and back covers of our lives, that paragraph is the story inside.

I’m not sure I ever attempted to describe dad to other people before he was gone and people were asking about him. I kept coming back to his passions.

I wasn’t the first person to write my father’s obituary. He wrote one himself, sometime in the 90s so far as I can tell. (I knew his first carotid surgery in the late 80s had made him think a lot about his mortality, but I didn’t realize he had taken it this far!) We all want to have the last word, right?

In his obituary, he wrote that key paragraph for himself: “He loved to talk, walk, ride his bicycle, ride his moped, and travel with his wife and best friend Sue. He liked to raise horses and drive them. He restored buggies and liked to read.”

In another section of this self-written obituary, he also mentioned his orthodontic practice, restoring the old Pedro ranch, and of course flying his airplane. After he wrote this, traveling with my mom became a motor home adventure, and raising horses turned into a quest to find the perfect backyard horse statue including hitching post and other horsey stuff.

But those three sentences hit the highlights, including I think his two favorite things in the world: my mother, and telling stories.

In November my mother had heart surgery, and I spent a lot of time with Dad, shuttling back and forth between the house and the hospital. It was probably the most one-on-one time I’d spent with him since he took me up into the mountains in the camper as a kid.

Anyone who knew my dad heard him tell stories, often more than once. But to my amazement, 42 years into our relationship, he told me one story I hadn’t heard before, not in its entirety. He told me the story of how he met my mother.

Proving that I am in many ways my father’s son, I have re-told that story, publicly, in what is probably the single most praised piece of writing I have ever done. I give dad full credit. The man who loved to tell stories was telling his great story, the most important story of his life, the story of meeting the love of his life.

In the summer of 1963 he met her on a beach in Northern California. It was a moment that set off a chain of events that impacted a whole lot of lives. It changed the childhood of my siblings, led to dad leaving his life at the time behind and moving away to start a new life and a new family.

I can only imagine the impact of those events at the time, but in the book of my father’s life, this was the middle, not the end. And you can’t judge a story when you’re still in the middle. From the perspective of 2013, we look back on nearly 50 years spent with his best friend. That was the culmination of his life.

His story has ended now. But there are always other stories. My dad’s mother was born at the turn of the century. His granddaughters were born at the turn of another. Dad was born in 1931. If his granddaughters have their own children at 30, those children would be born in 2031.

Our lives are links in a chain that goes into the deep past and extends, with any luck, into the far future.

Dad’s story has ended, but then, all stories do. A story isn’t a story without an ending.

This was a good story.