In a recent article author and professor Kelly McMasters shared how she wrote her obituary last week. As she explains,
“I often do so once a year; it has become a kind of ritual. I’ve met a few others who do the same or something similar. A teacher I know likes to start every new year by writing her obituary or what she hopes it will look like by year’s end. Another friend writes hers on Rosh Hashana. Recently a close friend wrote his life story as part of the process to get on the kidney transplant waiting list, and it occurred to me that’s exactly what their paragraphs resembled: a living obituary.”
An element of living is recognizing our time as a person on this earth, in this form, is limited. The question we are exploring right now in On Emotions is, “how to live?”
Considering, and writing, our obituary is a tool, as McMasters observes, to “offer clarity about your life and, mercifully, if you find something lacking, you still have time to revise.” As Margalit Fox says in the documentary “Obit” about the obituary section of The New York Times, “Obituaries have next to nothing to do with death and absolutely everything to do with life.”
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