My Father and I Wrote the Obituary Together
For his own father, two generations arguing over one adjective.
The funeral home gave us a form with space for two hundred words, and my grandfather did not fit.
He died on a Tuesday in March, in the recliner he had refused to replace for nineteen years, with a talk radio station still arguing to itself in the corner. By Thursday my father and I were at my parents' kitchen table with a yellow legal pad and a pot of coffee going cold between us.
My mother had assigned us the obituary the way generals assign missions. You two are the writers in this family, she said, which was generous, since my father writes invoices and I write poems that mostly live in a drawer.
The facts came fast. Born in 1938 in a town that no longer has a post office. Married Eleanor in 1961 after knowing her for eleven days. Three children, seven grandchildren, one dog he claimed to hate and fed bacon every morning of its life. Forty-one years at the same machine shop. Survived by. Preceded in death by.
Facts are the easy part... Facts are just a man's skeleton laid out flat on paper.
The fight started over one adjective.
I had written, "He was a stubborn man." My father read the line twice, set the pad down, and slid it back across the table like a poker player folding a bad hand.
"Steadfast," he said.
"Nobody has said steadfast out loud since 1952."
"Stubborn is an insult. You don't insult a man in his own obituary."
"It's not an insult, Dad. It's the truest thing about him. He drove to three hardware stores to save forty cents on hinges. He kept that recliner until it was more duct tape than chair. He didn't speak to Uncle Ray for six years over a lawnmower."
"And whose version of that story do you know?" my father said, and something in his voice dropped the temperature of the kitchen by ten degrees.
I knew the version everyone knew. Ray borrowed the mower, returned it broken, refused to pay for the repair, and two grown men went silent over eighty dollars. It was family legend. We told it at Thanksgiving the way other families tell stories about vacations.
My father looked at the window instead of at me. "Ray didn't break the mower," he said. "Ray came to him for money that spring. A lot of it. Gambling. Dad emptied the emergency envelope, handed it over, and told Mom he'd loaned Ray eighty bucks for mower repairs and Ray was being cheap about paying it back. The silence wasn't a grudge. Ray couldn't look at him afterward. And Dad let this whole family believe he was petty so that nobody would ever look at Ray and see what was actually wrong."
I sat there holding my pen like an idiot.
"So no," my father said. "Not stubborn. He carried that for six years and let it make him look smaller in front of his own grandchildren. You tell me the adjective for that."
We didn't write anything for a while... The coffee went from cold to undrinkable. Somewhere down the hall my mother was on the phone with the florist, saying the word carnations in a tone usually reserved for customs disputes.
Here is what nobody tells you about this particular chore.
An obituary is the only poem most families ever write together, and we draft it in the worst week of our lives.
Two hundred words for eighty-seven years. A form with a word limit, because grief gets billed by the column inch. And two survivors at a kitchen table discovering they had known two different men, arguing over which one gets printed in the paper.
We needed his exact hire date at the shop, so we went to his desk, a filing system understood by no living person: rubber bands, a coffee can of unsorted screws, warranty cards for appliances that died in the nineties. In the second drawer, in an envelope marked FOR WHOEVER GETS THIS JOB, was a single sheet in his handwriting.
He had written his own obituary.
Dated four years earlier, a month after his first bypass.
It was three sentences long.
"Herman worked at Doyle Machine for 41 years and fixed what he could. He married the only woman who ever beat him at cribbage honest. Don't spend money on flowers, the funeral home marks them up."
My father laughed in a way that turned into the other thing halfway through. I have seen my father cry twice in my life, and this was the first, sitting at his own kitchen table with his father's last piece of writing shaking slightly in his hand. He laid it flat and smoothed it twice, the way you smooth a thing you cannot fix.
"Fixed what he could," my father said. "He'd have hated every word we wrote."
He was right. Everything on our legal pad was fancy. Beloved. Devoted. Cherished by all who knew him.
We had been writing a greeting card.
The man had filed a machinist's report.
So we started over and followed his lead. We cut the adjectives. All of them, his and mine. Instead of stubborn or steadfast we wrote the hinge sentence: "He once drove to three hardware stores to save forty cents, and once gave away an entire envelope of savings without being asked twice." Anyone who knew him would understand. Anyone who didn't would at least meet the actual man instead of a laminated saint.
We kept his cribbage line word for word. My grandmother, eighty-four, read it at the kitchen table, snorted, and said, "Honest. He wishes." That exchange, I am fairly sure, is the exact shape of a fifty-nine-year marriage.
The paper ran it on a Saturday. Two hundred and eleven words. The funeral director charged us for the overage, eleven words at a dollar fifty each, and my father paid it with the face of a man tipping someone for insulting him. Somewhere, I am certain, my grandfather registered that sixteen dollars and fifty cents as the only true tragedy of the week.
For months afterward I couldn't write at all... Then, in late spring, instead of writing around it the way I had been, I finally wrote straight into the grief: a poem about the envelope in the second drawer, about a man drafting his own ending in three sentences because he didn't trust us not to make him sound better than he was. It grew into a longer thing about family, about how the people who love us most are usually the ones we describe worst.
A year later I typed it up and entered it into a monthly poetry contest, mostly because my father told me to and I have learned where the stubbornness in this family comes from. It didn't win... My father printed it anyway and taped it inside his toolbox lid, which is where the men in my family keep their poetry.
The adjective, in case you are wondering, never made it in. We didn't need it by the end. But I know what it should have been, and it wasn't stubborn, and it wasn't steadfast.
It was this: he fixed what he could. Some men just need the whole sentence.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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