At first I attributed this new habit to advancing age - I had recently turned 40 - and glumly concluded that I was becoming morbid. But why, then, was I finding my secret rite so uplifting? Finally, after many years of starting the day this way, I have figured out that I am doing it not to obsess about death but to find out about life. Real life. Obituaries capture the benchmarks of a life span without passing judgment or making order out of the events. The high points are easy - Pulitzer Prize winners joke that as soon as they are named they know what the headline is going to be on their obituary - but I read most attentively for clues to the defeats and the flat-line periods, the inexplicable changes of heart and the twists of fate, the gambles and the unexpected consequences, the loose ends.
First, though, I check out the vital statistics:
Age. I skim the day’s offerings for patterns. Is there a predominance of octogenarians? Or is it a Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People day? Then I go to the individual items. If someone is younger than I am, I feel a touch of relief - at least I made it past that point - before moving on to the more decent response of sadness at the life cut short. If the person is my age, I first look for clues as to what they may have done wrong to die so young. Does the accompanying picture show them smoking, for example, or does the article refer to a too hard-driving (read greedy) business life? If they are a lot older, I make godlike judgments about the appropriate age to go; and if they are only a little older than I am, I occasionally find myself thinking that it is old enough, before I realize that I wouldn’t be thinking that in eight or 10 years - but others reading about me might.
Cause of death. One paper I read regularly always gives the circumstances, even suicide; another one does not, which I find maddening, especially in the cases of an untimely demise. Some newspapers give clues - ““after a long illness’’ generally translates into cancer. AIDS, of course, is a continuing tragic leitmotif, and because of the visual impact of those four capitalized letters, it is easy for the eye to jump from a young age to the acronym to the list of survivors - often a partner, frequently sisters and a mother. That constellation is especially poignant to me because it recalls my place in my own brother’s family summary, so I always pause a beat there.
Then I am ready to get into the real texture of a life story. I pay special attention to the time frame of events. Which happened in classic sequence? Which in remarkable circumstances? Which suggest a reinvented personality, a lady into a tiger, for example, at midlife? I look for gaps in time connoting, to my mind, periods of despair and self-doubt. A recent obituary described a singer who in 1969 ““developed pneumonia while entertaining the troops in Vietnam and went to the Philippines for treatment. She stayed there for nearly two decades.’’ She returned to singing in 1996 - after a stroke and complications from diabetes forced her to have both legs amputated. My mind wanders into those nearly two decades in search of a sense of how it was for her, what her choices were. Was she happy, lonely, poor? Did those 20 years seem interminable? Did she always believe she would perform again? And across the page from her is the story of a pro golfer whose ““success was remarkable considering that when he was 12 he shattered his left elbow in a playground fall,’’ which left that arm 10 inches shorter than the right. I read about the special exercises he did to overcome his handicap. Where did he get the fortitude to do that? Who inspired him? Would I, at more than quadruple his age, have the perseverance? Would I be able to inspire my own 12-year-old if he were so badly treated by fate?
Perhaps because I am so lacking in patience myself, such stories of struggle over time are especially mysterious and compelling to me. How long this person was ignored or reviled; how long that one was poor and denied an education; how many years of loneliness, how many years of study, how many years of patience? Was it worth it, I ask.
I am also attentive to the momentary lurches that define a life’s trajectory. They often show up only in fragments. Not long ago the obituary of a French banker concluded, after listing his survivors, with the stark sentence: ““His only son, Philip, died last March.’’ Or this information about the short-armed golfer: ““Furgol became a celebrity, appearing on Ed Sullivan’s variety television show with the heavyweight boxing champion Rocky Marciano.''
The message that comes through over and over is that although there are times in any life when things seem to be proceeding step by logical step, the whole is mostly random and askew. Life, as every biography and obit I have ever read confirms, is what happens when you are making other plans.
I find that insight from John Lennon the perfect send-off from my predawn reveries to my next task - awakening my children, who, life force that they are, turn out as they will, no matter what plans we have made for them.
