The Obituary I Rewrote Nine Times
How do you fit a whole laugh into forty printed words?
The newspaper charges four dollars and ninety cents a word, and my father died on a Thursday, which gave us until Monday to decide which forty words he was. That is not an assignment anyone wants, but somebody in every family gets handed the pen, and in mine it was me, because I once had a poem published in a magazine nobody has heard of, and in my family that makes me Hemingway.
His name was Raymond. He was seventy one. He laughed from somewhere under the floorboards, a laugh that arrived in a room before he did and stayed after he left, and my first problem was that no version of the phrase survived by could carry it.
Draft one was the tax form. Born in Scranton. Worked thirty four years at the plant. Survived by a wife, three children, six grandchildren. Services Tuesday. I read it back and heard a man being processed, stamped, and filed. My father had opinions about paperwork. He would have sent it back.
Draft two tried to be warm and came out damp. Beloved husband and father. Never met a stranger. He will be dearly missed. I had seen those exact sentences in the paper a hundred times, under a hundred different photographs of men in glasses, and I could not remember a single one of those men.
That was what scared me... Not that he was gone. That he would be filed under the same forty words as everyone else.
Nobody teaches you this. There is no class called writing an obituary, no unit wedged between algebra and civics where they warn you that someday you will do the hardest writing of your life in seventy two hours, by word count, at four dollars and ninety cents a word, for an audience of everyone he ever knew.
Draft three tried funny and I deleted it, because funny felt like a violation. That was Friday... By Saturday I understood that leaving the funny out was the violation. This was a man who told my mother, on their fortieth anniversary, that she had exceeded the terms of the warranty. A man who booed the microwave when it beeped at him. Solemn was not his address. Solemn was not even his zip code.
Draft five was nine hundred words and would have cost four thousand four hundred and ten dollars, and I could hear him in my ear, doing the math faster than I could, saying absolutely not, kiddo, cut everything after my name.
My sister wanted the golf mentioned. My brother wanted the Army years. My mother kept saying, just write that he was kind, and then leaving the room... which is its own kind of eulogy. Draft seven had everything everyone wanted, which is how I learned that an obituary written by committee is a hostage note.
An obituary is not a summary of a life. It is a receipt. It proves that somebody was paying attention.
By Sunday night I was on draft nine, sitting at his desk because my own desk felt too far away from him. I had gone in there hunting for the insurance folder my mother needed, and in the bottom drawer, the one that never closed right, between the warranty for a lawnmower he no longer owned and a coupon that expired in 2011.
I found a white envelope with my name on it.
Inside, on lined paper, in the careful handwriting he saved for serious things, it said: OBITUARY. Do not let your mother write this, she will make me sound like a saint and your uncle Walt will laugh at the viewing. Do not pay for more than forty words. Below the instructions he had written exactly forty.
Raymond Kowalski, 71, died doing what he loved, ignoring his doctor. He leaves a wife he never deserved, three kids he bragged about to strangers, and a garage full of screws sorted by size. No flowers. Tip your waitress.
He had dated it four years earlier. Two weeks after his first heart attack, when the rest of us were still busy pretending it had been indigestion, my father sat at this desk and did his own paperwork. He knew exactly what we would be like. He knew my mother would canonize him, my sister would litigate every comma, and I would sit up three nights straight trying to fold his laugh into a rectangle of newsprint.
So he left us an exit.
I laughed alone in his study at eleven at night, the ugly kind of laughing that is really crying wearing a coat... because it was perfect. A garage full of screws sorted by size. The man alphabetized his hot sauces. Of course his obituary came in at exactly forty words.
Of course he had counted.
We ran it word for word. The funeral home director hesitated at tip your waitress, and my mother, God bless her forever, looked at him over her glasses and said, it stays. The paper printed it on a Tuesday, wedged between two saints, two beloved pillars of the community who will be dearly missed, and there was my father in the middle of them, being entirely himself one last time, at a total cost of one hundred and ninety six dollars.
Strangers cut it out of the paper. We know because the waitress at the diner on Route 9 taped it to her register, which is also how we found out he had been tipping her thirty percent for twenty years and telling my mother the food was cheap. People who never met him read forty words and knew him. That is not a trick of writing. That is just what the truth sounds like when you stop apologizing for it.
The nine hundred word version, draft five, I never threw away. Months later I posted it on a community wall where writers put up the things they cannot keep folded, the whole unaffordable thing, the laugh, the screws, the Sunday pancakes he burned on purpose because we liked the crispy ones. Strangers who never shook his hand wrote underneath that they missed him too. It cost nothing a word there. It ran exactly as long as I needed it to.
I still write about him. Small poems, mostly, about memory and about family, about garages and coupons and men who plan ahead for the people they love and disguise it as being cheap. I keep his envelope in my own desk now, in a bottom drawer that will not close right, where my kids will someday find the forty words I have already counted out for them.
Forty words ran in the paper. The laugh did not fit... The laugh was never going to fit.
That is what the rest of my life is for.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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