When it comes to writing I have been a procrastinator my whole life. From the Western Civilizations paper in high school to the take home final for an arts in education class a few years ago, I can’t churn the work out. It’s not that I don’t enjoy writing, in fact I’m really quite fond of it, but when I set out on assignment, I am always waiting for that elusive divine spark of inspiration… that flash of brilliance that will make the essay poignant, memorable, and worth the reader’s time.

I was given an assignment months ago by my mother-in-law to write the obituary for Bob, my father-in-law, just to have it ready to go when the time came. I started the outline:

• Birth
• School
• Navy
• Family
• Employment
• Volunteering/Social Activities
• Church

I felt these were the highlights and I would fill in the blanks as the facts were revealed to me. When my husband, John, interviewed his dad in March, I learned specific anecdotes about his life, important bits of family lore, but not material that was really appropriate for the general public.

And then in June I got caught up in the existential question of how you measure the life of a man in 500 words. The Portraits of Grief published by the New York Times after September 11 were limited to 200 word “snapshots” and although each followed a formula, you read enough information to think, “She sounds like she had a great sense of humor,” or you wondered how you could become the new soccer coach for the 8-year-olds, whose coach was killed that September morning.

In July, I started fleshing out actual sentences using the memorial equivalent of resume words. Instead of action words like initiated, created, developed, or managed, I chose words like dedicated, devoted, committed, and inspired.

If existential angst hounded me in June, in August it was replaced by irrational fear, fear that as soon as I finish writing the obituary, Bob
would die. Completely and totally irrational, I know. I gritted my teeth and e-mailed my husband the finished draft of the obit last Monday night and told him to fact check dates, confirm names, and make sure my mother-in-law was happy with it.

And John did just that, the next morning, a few hours after Bob passed from this world to the next.

Be well.