Honoring Black History

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I spent time this week working on my third obituary. You won’t find it in the Advocate, or any other paper in Colorado, for that matter. It ran in a few papers on the East Coast, because it concerned a woman who lived most of her life on that end of the country. I worked on it because the woman was my grandmother.

I’ve written news obituaries for strangers, and struggled to effectively represent a person’s life in a few inches of text. It’s impossible. The only hope is to fairly convey a portion of who he or she was in a way that helps people understand that this is a person who will be missed.

What I know of my grandmother gets parsed out in a few lines about where she grew up, what she did for a career, who died before her, and who will die after.

It does not tell you about how she sang in the kitchen while she cooked dinner—how her voice would carry down the hallway to the bedroom I stayed in for weeks each summer.

It certainly cannot convey what a pleasure it was to have a conversation with her. Or that I saw her as an example for what women must endeavor to be—strong, independent, willing to speak her mind and stand by what she had said.

Like a funeral, an obituary is about the dead, but for the living. What need do they have for our choice in music, poetry, and flowers? None. What interest do they have in how we break their life stories down into digestible chunks we’ll pay for by the line? They don’t. But we do. We need it.

We sat, as a family, around a kitchen table, and squeezed her life into 28 lines of text so that somewhere in the world there was a record of her that said a little more than what birth, death, and marriage certificates do.

And we do this, it seems, because we still look to newspapers to provide some record of who we have been as people. It’s the aim of a newspaper every day, on every page. It just happens to seem to mean a lot more when it comes with a death notice.

Elizabeth MIller, Editor in Chief

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