Here's One (for real) Obituary you hope will NEVER be your own!

[gategrrl]

Check this out. Isn't this simply the saddest, but most honest obit ever? Reminds me of Speaker for the Dead, where Ender created a new profession of a person who would investigate and the retell (with resultant lessons) a dead person's life, with brutal, yet regulated honesty about that person. Personally, I think it's probably the most brilliant thing Orson Scott Card ever came up with.

Thanks to Adeline on Isle of Whack on Delphi for this lead.

Comments

[gategrrl.livejournal.com]

You know, I do not in the least condemn the woman who wrote that obit for her mother. That obit was mentioned in a thread on Delphi that generated a lot of "MY GOD, how *classless!*, how MEAN, how HORRIBLE! that the woman who wrote it was to put it out in public.

Well, I'm not sorry: there are toxic people in this world, and they're toxic for their own reasons or for how they were raised (no fault of their own) but people like the woman who died ARE responsible for untold havok, personal difficulties in their families, abuse, deformation or their children, whatever. It doesn't matter what the reason. If it's how her children saw her, that's how they saw her, and the mourning of a death is NOT the same for everyone, nor should social convention reign over all.

Yeah, some of the self-righteousness in that Delphi thread got to me. Not everyone is a nice person. Not everyone feels they should conform to an outmoded mourning form.

[betacandy.livejournal.com]

I think most people buy into the idea of "family first" no matter what. Which is a big part of why abusers manage to keep doing what they're doing secretly for generations. Everyone should be aware this stuff happens, and not just, you know, in the projects or wherever it is people imagine awful stuff to be safely confined. It really says a lot that we're all shocked - pleasantly or unpleasantly - that this person had the nerve to write the truth in an obit.