Obituary

Writing it wasn’t a necessity and I ended up letting my brother do it. But reading it was a necessity and, of course, I screwed up because I didn’t get the paper on the right day. I thought it was going in on Wednesday but it actually went in on Tuesday. When I found this out on Tuesday night, I was really freaked out that I had missed reading my own father’s obituary. I needed to read it. I went on the web and I printed it out from the Hamilton Spectator website. It had also appeared in the Guelph Mercury and the Kitchener-Waterloo Record. I also asked a friend to give me their copy of the newspaper. The next day, he delivered the obituary to my house. He’d cut it out neatly and taped it to a piece of paper. I was very grateful. But I really wanted more than that. I actually wanted to read the whole page – “Deaths”. When my friend Sylvia died in the summer, I ripped out the whole page and I read not only her obituary but everyone else’s as well. There was one guy right beside her. I can still sort of see his picture (published with the obit.) in my mind. His hair was flying around or something. I want to see the full page with my dad’s obit. in context. I want to see who else is in there with him. I guess I’ll go to the library at some point and check it out. It seems to be important. Even yesterday... I saw a bunch of newspapers in my neighbour’s blue box. He has a paper route and I guess he had some extras. I started looking through them hoping, I guess, to see Tuesday’s paper in there but all I saw was a whole stack of Thursday’s paper. The headline had the word “father” in it. I thought of reading the story but it was so cold and windy, I just walked home. I recall now that my mother was a big Obituary reader. I think it helped her to keep in touch with her community especially when she moved out of Toronto but kept reading a Toronto paper. She’d often comment on people she knew whose passing was only communicated to her through the obituaries. I’ve always read the “Deaths”. Summaries and lists and bits of a life. Sometimes a picture. I guess this is grieving…