by Juliet Chase

Created on: September 03, 2009   Last Updated: September 05, 2009

Every person has a story. Some are more obvious than others but we each have one. The obituary simply lets people know that this particular story has reached 'The End'. It's never easy to sit down and write an obituary, but if you worry too much about it, it will simply get harder. It is not a dry collection of facts to be relayed; it is a story to be told.

After the basics of name, age, and place of residence, what do you want people to remember about this person? What made them unique and special? Was it really that she played the church organ thirty years ago? Or was it more that she taught each of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren to play canasta? What nicknames did he have within the family, at work, as a child? What was he most proud of?

Too often social notions of what is proper or politically correct make it into the paper along with the complete listing of every surviving or pre-deceased relative. Some of that is part of the story, but most of it isn't. Many mothers are wonderful mothers. What made yours wonderful? It can be hard to sum up a person and an entire lifetime in just a few lines, but the gist of the person can come through even in that brief space. If you look to what was important to them, what they talked about the most you'll head down the right path.

We are loved for our imperfections so celebrate your uncle's love of a good argument or your mother's need to control Christmas dinner even though it ended up taking ten hours when she was in her 90's. These are the things we want to remember and remember with fondness. These are the things that make people individuals with individual stories and bind the rest of us together out of shared experiences. Often it's the small details and not the major accomplishments that best describe a person; a fondness for dime store chocolate-covered cherries or making pancakes on Sunday. Maybe it was a complete inability to cook anything at all.

Even the most prosaic life has some adventure in it. Introduce your loved one to the rest of us so that we can know what we missed by not being acquainted. After all, some of us never had an offer to learn to play canasta.

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