Aunt Babe and the Obituaries
I had an old maid Great Aunt, my grandmother’s sister, Aunt Babe. In all of my remembrances of her she was old. In her later years, she lived to be well over 100, she lived in an apartment my dad attached to the rear of our house. I was gone from home by then. I mostly remember her living in her rural “dog run” home with a well out front and an outhouse out back. After her death, they moved the house to the museum in Southwest Louisiana as an example of that style of building.
After she moved in with my folks Dad would take the newspaper to her soon after it came. She bypassed the news articles and turned directly to the obituaries. She would carefully go through those commenting on those she knew or if she knew their relatives. Sometimes on the church, the funeral would take place. If it was not in a church but in a Funeral Home she would comment loudly on that. After all good Christians had church funerals. Always a comment sometimes shedding a tear. That was often the only part of the paper she looked at. I suppose she lived primarily in the memories of better days.
After several years Dad noticed that she took the paper but no longer looked through it or commented on the obituaries. She just added it to the stack to go in the trash.
He asked her if she no longer wanted to see the paper. She responded that she wasn’t interested, that “she didn’t know any of those people.”
I suppose she had outlived her contemporaries and the people in the obituaries were younger and strangers to her. In some ways she had lived too long.
She lived a long life but much of it was lived in the past. The world passed her by as she focused on who and what had been, with little or no interest in the present.
I have noticed that the obituaries interest me more and more. I also notice a lot of them are about people younger than me. Have I lived too long? Not yet! I try to stay up on the living more than the dead. I try to live in the present, not the past.