Dead people for Breakfast

The cars traveling my direction are backed up on the two lane highway. I run the wipers again, smearing the light rain and grit on the windshield as I try to see why we are all going so slowly. Like I even have to look. I know he is up there somewhere, and we are all piled in behind him. Twenty other people in twenty other cars, all with somewhere to be, and he is putting along, taking his sweet time, smelling the damn roses. Except it is raining in the middle of winter. There are no roses.

I glance down at the clock. Some people can walk into the office five minutes late and it isn’t that big of a deal. Not so with me. In this instance, even the dead people won’t wait.

You see, every morning, I have my first cup of coffee with dead people. At least they don’t hog the conversation. No, I get to do all of the talking, although I am talking about them.

I am a radio host on a small station near New Orleans. I start my day with the morning obituaries. That’s right. Every weekday. Maybe other parts of the country get their juices flowing by finding out what the weather is going to do, or where the stock market might go. Down in the nether region of the country, we like to know who kicked off the night before.

That’s a shame, too, because obituaries aren’t what they used to be. Imagine the wedding section of the Times, where they make an effort to be flippant about money and success. “Amy’s father was from San Francisco where he prospered in dry goods.” “Carl heads up the technology department at a smallish company that starts with an ‘I’ and ends with an ‘M’.” “For their honeymoon, Jody and Frank plan to see the world, from the deck of their 78 foot sloop ‘The Bounty and the Harvest’. Frank works in the financial industry.”      

Still, despite the penchant for ridiculous understatement when it comes to wedding announcements in the Times, they do manage to tell a good story.

Obituaries used to be like that, too. They used to tell the story of a life well-lived, and often times they didn’t let something like the truth get in the way. And why wouldn’t they do this? I mean, the person in question did die. They are gone. Forever. Can’t we throw them a bone or two on their way out the door to eternity?  

Apparently not.

Nowadays most obits are formulaic and boring. The person died, the date they passed, a little bit about what they did, but told more in job interview fashion instead of a real story. The obit will talk about who they left behind, what times to come by and say something awkward to those who were left behind, and what to give in lieu of flowers as one last generous act by the deceased, proving that even dead they were a bigger person than you are.

More often than not, today’s obits force us to read between the lines to understand the life the dead person lived, like anyone has the time or energy to do that.

Except me.

Something about reading the obituary of a total stranger at the dawn of a new day fills me with regret and curiosity. These are “hot off the press” deaths. It is something I do for the radio station because it is sponsored by a local funeral home, and what a great way for our typical listener to start the day. “Good morning! Here’s who died last night.” But, let me miss the obits and the phone starts ringing. So someone is listening. Someone is keeping the eternal score. 

Generally, in order to soften the blow of what I am about to deliver, I will start the obit break with something fluffy about celebrities. To me, it is easier to go from ridiculous to death than it is from something more concrete, like the weather. Or worse yet, going from who won last night’s ball game to who was simultaneously grabbing their chest and keeling out of their Lazy-Boy. You also have to be careful about the song selection leading into what I call the commercial break of death. Black Eyed Peas getting the Party Started might be a little uppity for an intro into who just kicked the bucket.

“That was Pink right here on the Lake 94.7 with Blow Me One Last Kiss. Speaking of blowing, you hear about this blow up between Nicki and Mariah on the set of American Idol? Keith Urban says he feels like the UN trying to keep the peace. And Nicki was heard in another recording saying if she could get her hands on a gun she would use it on Mariah. Sounds like Idol is headed for ratings gold this season. Anyway, time for your morning obituary report.” 

And then it begins.

A fresh list of the newly dead.

For the sake of airtime we try to keep our report down to the bare minimum. So we take the bad writing of today’s obits and cut it even more. Who died, when, the funeral arrangements, the times and places. And then what you can give in lieu of flowers. (That’s the big thing now, instead of a big floral arrangement, they ask you to deliver a final donation on behalf of the deceased to some worthwhile charity, which has got to really piss off everyone in the flower industry.)

Even though airtime limits what I report on the deceased, I still find myself wanting to know more. A lot more. I feel like it is someone I’ve just met and we are having that first conversation where even the basics are exciting. And today’s obits always leave me hanging. Yes, Rebecca died October 2^nd in her Mandeville home. What else? This obit tells me next to nothing, other than she is dead. Was her family there? Was it sudden? Did she suffer? What did she accomplish in life? Why do I want to know these things about a total stranger? It is mainly so that I can measure her life against my own, and explore her manner of death to see if it will be a suitable ending for me.

Eleanor passed away on October 10^th. No birthdate was given. There is a service in Louisiana but the burial is in Missouri. What was in Missouri. What brought her down here? Love? A job? Was she running toward something, or away from something? Ahh, in lieu of flowers the family requests donations to cancer research. A nugget of information hidden in the list of common facts. So, I don’t know how old she was, or why she ended moving halfway across the country when she obviously still had roots elsewhere, but I do know what got her in the end. 

Ditto with Randy. How old was the guy? No date was given. It lists some survivors, but I can see his wife went first and I don’t see anything about kids. Uh-oh. In lieu of flowers the family requested donations to the Center for Bleeding and Cutting Disorders. Yikes! Randy was a cutter? Was that what did him in? Dear Lord! Was his cutting what did his wife in? Like, maybe with a chainsaw? I race through the obit again. No, I misread it. The Center for Bleeding and Clotting Disorders. Hmmm, that didn’t sound good, either, but it was a hell of a lot better than the cutting. So Randy would start to bleed and they couldn’t stop it? That sounded like a messy way to go.  

A lot of times the detail involved in the obit, and the speed with which that detail is shared, will tell you more than the words themselves when it comes to the manner of death. A slow lingering death usually provides a quick posting and a relatively well written obit. Not always. But, usually everyone has time on their hands and someone has tended to this detail. However, there are the questions to be asked with the exception. Inquiries should be expected if something like Alzheimer’s brought about the death and the obit is slow in coming and poorly written. Are the descendants uneducated and lazy? Or maybe the genetic manner of death is already spreading through the family? Or were they simply in denial and didn’t want to own up impending loss of a loved one?   

The deaths that were sudden, the shocking ones, those obits often read like it, coming off the paper like the written summary was thrown together when emotions were way too raw. These notices consist of simple declarative sentences and little more, like even this summation of life is only the beginning of the long journey toward coping with the sudden, devastating loss.

There’s the suicide, which leaves the largest holes in the obit. The manner of death in a suicide obit will not be directly referenced, but will usually incorporate words like “tragic”. “Senseless” is often reserved for a murder victim, but not always, as it can also be used in an auto accident where someone else was at fault, which would cue the drunk driver story until just recently; now it is as bad with the texting driver and pretty hard for the reader to determine what precipitated the death, Bud or Twitter.

You can assume the death was prolonged if they thank caregivers by name. If they simply thank the organization that provided the caregivers, then the death was quicker, or the caregivers weren’t very good. If they refer to the caregiver by a first name, then you know they almost became family.

Is that what I want? An obit where I can thank people for their care as I died? In theory it sounds good, but in reality I would prefer a really crappy obit, right? Except then that would mean I went before my time. It’s not like I can write “Charles Dowdy died while sitting on a beach with his wife of sixty-four years and a cooler of beer. He was fine when she left to refresh her glass of wine. When she returned, Charles had passed.”

In the end, you can cheat on your taxes, but death is going to affect us all. Given how I start each day, it is hard not to think about death, even in the best of times.

It is on my morning drive where I begin to wonder what dead people I will soon be talking about. That’s because before I deliver my report on death, I drive eighteen miles on darkened two lane highways. Without fail, every morning, I have to be on the lookout for that cockeyed, older model Lincoln. Like clockwork, somewhere on the drive, I will come up behind the older automobile, or rather a slew of other drivers behind this automobile. The posted speed limit is fifty-five miles per hour. I’m lucky if this guy is going thirty-five. So I always have to be paying attention. I know he is out there each morning, somewhere in front of me in the gloom, or the fog, or the rain, as is the case on this morning. It is like clockwork. I know he will be waiting for me. We are travelling the same path, only I am moving that much faster.

It is just like death. In the end we’re all on a drive toward eternity, some of us are just going a little faster than others. Either way, we will all end up in the same place.

With that cock-eyed Lincoln safely in my rear view mirror, I arrive at work in time to take a sip of coffee and prepare for the break of death. I’m leading into the obits with an entertainment piece about the Rolling Stones, which I deem totally appropriate since they look like they should be dead. After that, there are eight obits to be read. A busy night for the guy with the scythe.

I check one last thing before cutting on the mic. Oops, Katy Perry and what she did last Friday night, will not do coming out of the death break. I select an Eagles tune. Hotel California. Under my finger the mic cuts on. I take a breath. And now I will talk to dead people for breakfast. I do not know them, although I want to. And I will do my best to read between the lines as I try to understand who they were, what kind of life they lived, and why they are gone.