My Obituary Will Not Be Written

May each of us have a good life, a good death, and a good after-death.

My obituary will be simple.

Date of birth, date of death.

Nothing more. No photo.

The people who already know me know everything they want to know about me. Trust me, even those closest to me already have too much information. And I tend to tell the same story at least ten to twenty times to any given victim, I mean listener.

Those who don't know me, don't need to know where I worked, what my hobbies were, who my nearest kin are, what clubs I belonged to, what supernatural feats I performed for clients, what sound experiments I indulged in at my music lab, and what bleak and lonely hermitages I founded.

Let word of mouth carry my legacy to future generations who won't, and shouldn't, care about it.

Why would anyone want to publish what actually amounts to a posthumous advertisement about their life? Isn't that what an obituary is? As an ad writer, I don't want my final memorial to be an ad.

I'd rather have people think: "What WAS that? He's gone now, but when he was here, things happened."

I'd rather be a breeze that passed by and mischievously vanished than an ornate monument that pigeons relieve themselves on.

Let my lack of statement be a statement that rings loud and unclear.

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