Gringo View: Is Now a Good Time to Write Your Own Obituary?

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) How many of us, stranded and isolated for the past months by the pandemic and unable to have normal contact with an everyday outside world have wondered about the inevitability of our own deaths?

This gringo has. And with all the death around us, it would be surprising if most of us have not.

A recipient of a regularly rising wave of notices announcing the passing of school and university classmates, each day I do a quick mental calculation of my age compared to the average of the subjects in the on-line obits. And as I meditate during our pandemic-enforced sequestration, I wonder — which one of us doesn’t — what my obituary might look like and how I would feel reading it?

What picture of myself would I be comfortable to leave behind, if any? Which would be better: write it myself or leave it to someone else; assuming anyone would bother to undertake the task after my demise?

Would I want it to honestly try and define my life, warts and all, or would it be better to diplomatically paper over most of the cracks and present the kind of homogenized narratives that I keep receiving, of schools attended, occupations and professions performed and domestic bliss attained?

When we are not here anymore what really do we wish to leave behind that will tell our stories? I’ve come to realize that many of the true but wild things I might want to relate and stories I would want to tell involve living people who might rightly be hurt or at least be very angry. Is that fair to them or shouldn’t I give a damn?

Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s vice-presidential candidate said perceptively in a recent interview; “if you don’t want anyone else to define you, you had better define yourself.” That sounds like good advice to write your own obit.

Reflecting on writing mine confounds me as a very different task than, say, writing a CV or even a memoire or autobiography. Like Mark Twain’s famous remark about giving up smoking – “It’s easy. I’ve done it hundreds of times”, I have a hard drive full of abandoned tries.

For me the task begins with thinking back over the years of a very active existence, astonished at just what I can recall in almost photographic detail and what, despite very considerable effort, cannot be dredged up from my memory at all.

In retrospect, many of what I thought at the time were the ‘big’ things in my life; graduations, romances, weddings, births of children, family gatherings, triumphs and disasters have all paled into a blur to be replaced by remembered sharp-focus snippets – the wonderful taste and smell of hot pain au chocolat in the staff car on the way to making a series of broadcasts for NATO in Paris – the instant sobering up after an evening of carousing in Venice when I sensed myself in danger of being robbed or worse – the riotous help of Brazilian soccer legend Pelé who had been my seat companion on a flight to New York from São Paulo, standing together in the falling snow and uncrating and loading into the trunk of a car at Kennedy airport, an almost human-sized naïve Brazilian wooden statue of a naked goddess.

It’s interesting how isolation helps us sort out what seems important now that our world is going through a period of awesome dramatic change. We can’t help asking: does today’s tawdry news of Trump’s or Bolsonaro’s ravings, whether Flamengo has any chance to move up in the rating tables and win the Series A cup or even whether our employer company has been able to re-arrange the office furniture for proper safe social distancing really matter at all? If they don’t: what does?

Perhaps we would be better off musing about all the injustice that pervades our world and how we are destroying our planet and what each of us could do to make some contribution, however small, to changing things for the better?

This gringo has been exceptionally lucky to have been able to trade the Covid-19 dangers of São Paulo for a secluded house in the Mata Atlantica near Trancoso. It has provided a beautifully balance of the need to bond with the universal future without ignoring the temporal noise of the coming US election that daily demands my attention.

Perhaps the exercise of composing our own obituaries can be an inspiration in our own lives. It can help define how we measure up to what we would wish to be said about us and who we want to be rather than who we are at this particular moment. It is for me.

If we were outsiders reading about ourselves, would our obituaries reflect the persons we wish we were? And if not, what changes would we have to make so that they would?

That’s what I’m working on and why I’m going on with my obituary,