Obituraries

[lydy]

I don't read obits. I'm not that old, yet, and not that interested in the deaths of strangers. If anyone I care about dies, I'll hear about it -- except for Angela. My high school not-quite-sweetheart. (There's a post in my journal a while back about her.) She doesn't want to have any contact with me, for completely understandable reasons. She also has Stage IV breast cancer. Five year survival rate: 16%. So, every now and then, I check the obits on-line. I wonder if this will work. It won't tell me if there's a grave at which to leave roses. I'm not sure why I want to know. It would be rude to call her husband to ask if I could attend the funeral. But I still want to know. I want her to beat the odds, I want her to live forever, but I want to know.

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[lydy.livejournal.com]

The Chicago Tribune in their on-line obit page has a link to Legacy.org and the Social Security database, so when I search, I use both of them. In the end, all I want is to be able to put a pebble on her grave. But if she died and I found out, I still probably wouldn't be able to find her gravestone. I mean, who do you ask? Not her family, most certainly.

There's something appealingly dramatic about dressing all in black with a veil and sitting in the last pew during the funeral service, but it has a voyeuristic aspect to it, almost a vampiric one. and again, it would be unreasonably hard on the family to ask if I might attend, even if the service was announced in the paper.