Monday, March 2, 2009

I See Dead People

Okay actually I don't. But I read about them. A lot. One of the things I am in charge of at work is our huge database of donors and participants and family members and other random connections and such. Having over 10,000 people to keep track of is a lot. When I do mailings, obviously I want to save on postage as much as I can.

Therefore, every morning I scour the obituaries on syracuse.com and see if any of my constituents or their family members have died. It's actually one of the favorite parts of my day. Usually I go through the obits first thing in the morning, so I make myself a cup of tea and settle in at my desk. Scouring through the names, I usually find at least one person per day connected to us in some way.

Reading all of the obituaries is like going through all the genres of movies or literature. There are the notices of young kids that die in car crashes or stillborn babies that make me want to cry. Then there are the 97-year-old great-grandmas who died peacefully in their sleep after a long fulfilling life.

There are several important aspects to every obituary: the life story, the surviving relatives, services, and contributions. The life story is the most varied portion. Some people have one line that says when they died and where they were from and that's it. Others have novels about their childhood through adulthood and lists every club or organization they were involved with and every pet they ever had and every every job they ever held. My goal in life (or death, I suppose) is to have a nice middle-of-the-road obituary. Sorry Pongo - you probably won't make the cut.

The "In lieu of flowers" section is the other section I notice the most. It's kind of morbid, but I always hope I'll find our name listed. Memorial donations can raise a lot of money without having to do the solicitation. Now please don't get me wrong - I obviously don't want anyone connected to us to die.

Reading the obituaries every day makes you think a lot about...well, death. It's funny those few paragraphs are the way your loved ones choose to represent you to the world. But I guess it's not really important what I think when I read the obituaries about people I don't know. What matters is how the people they knew and influenced remember them.

Remember that whole getting ahead of myself thing? Here I am, thinking about my death and how I want to be remembered and all that nonsense. Probably not what I should be focused on right now - I got a long time before that comes (hopefully).

"There's two dates in time
That they'll carve on your stone
And everyone knows what they mean
What's more important
Is the time that is known
In that little dash there in between"
-Garth Brooks, "Pushing Up Daisies

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