A Formal Feeling Comes

After great pain a formal feeling comes—

the nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs

--

The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He that bore

And ‘yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round—

A Wooden way

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—

Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone—

This is the Hour of Lead—

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—

First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—

-Emily Dickinson

A moment like: standing at a pine table at a south Louisiana crawfish boil and realizing your beer or untidy heap of discarded carcasses or boiled corn is leaking onto a page of newspaper obituaries. The fresh dead looking up from the wreckage of the table.

“We are saddened to announce…”

“It’s with a heavy heart that we…”

”Please join us to celebrate the life of…”

You might feel a certain tug in your gut, under the carport or the backyard or sunny sidewalk in front of the bar, and accept this memento mori as being one with the spice, the tender meat, the sun and friends. You might pull yourself out of the chatter and take a moment to recognize that these people, too, may have once enjoyed a good crawfish boil and a cold-ish beer. But at the moment, the distillations of their lives and recent deaths have been strictly formatted and repurposed as a temporary tablecloth for your meal, soon to be bundled and thrown into the stinkiest of garbage cans. 

Or, you might be inured to the obituary page—its repetitive, rigid, timeless format dulling any emotional connection to the words and faces. The banal ubiquity of death mirrored by the banal ubiquity of the format. You process it as a merely hieroglyphic march of information down the page.

In these moments, death has been contained and formalized, presented to you on the page along with other news of civic importance. Obituaries exist in that heightened period after a loss, when the deceased’s material existence is still lingering in the world, sharp and glowing with grief, assessment, conjured memories. They’re often the last chance loved ones have to publicly proclaim their good feelings about the deceased, their pride and sorrow, and if you can afford to pay the paper extra, you can go beyond the meager given word count and attempt to flesh out the life on the page.

If your family cannot afford a wordy, effusive obituary, you’re assigned a short perfunctory one. You might have lived a large, loud, generous life but on the page, it might appear small and quiet, fixed in the public record, in time and space. But sometimes these slender columns live beyond that moment. For Mardi Gras one year, a friend made a costume inspired by Cajun carnival rag suits using obituaries, the centerpiece of which was a black umbrella covered with rows of them, streaming down around him in a paper fringe curtain of the dead. At the end of the day, he put the whole thing in a box on the Mississippi River and lit it on fire. Another friend, who’d moved to New Orleans from Arizona, was so struck by obituary pictures in which the deceased is wearing Mardi Gras beads, that she began collecting them, covering her refrigerator until she had to move them to a scrapbook. (Bead obituary pics never occurred to me as strange—parades often bring out an intense, elusive and very photogenic kind of happiness.)

A friend of my mother’s laminated copies of my youngest sister’s obituary, which I used for years as a bookmark and sometimes still unexpectedly come across, in a collection of short stories I’d been teaching at the time, or in the middle of a difficult novel I gave up on. Grainy and imperfectly cut, preserved in its plastic sheath, it’s an artifact from a distant and horrible time. And I have to remind myself—I wrote that. That one and also her twin sister’s. And also my dad’s and my nephew’s.

Being the writer in the family, I was the default choice for obituary author, given the special burden of describing a loved one’s accumulation of traits, accomplishments, cause of death. One benefit of obituary writing is that it takes you out of the chaos of grieving and gives you a task with strict parameters, refocuses the mind towards dates, education, career, survivors, spellings, and other details. But for someone who thinks too much about the possibilities and impossibilities of language, its frustrating limitations—obituary writing—this delicate act of genteel public sharing, is an excruciating task. Worse is seeing the obituaries in print, knowing they are more or less accurate and also somewhat wrong,carefully wrought well-meaning deceptions.

While it’s disorienting to encounter these ephemeral memorials (words + life + eternity) on the page, it also seems right that they end up on the most ephemeral of material (newsprint). But now, like so much else in life, obituaries have migrated online, accompanied by a guest book, the equivalent of a comments section. They may last longer in the official, searchable record, and have a universal reach that papers don’t have, but, having been liberated from the “DEATHS” section of the newspaper, they also isolate the dead. On a newspaper spread, you can stumble upon these lived lives of people you never would’ve met otherwise, between sips of coffee give them a few moments of your morning attention. Briefly ponder their fascinating/long/short/curious lives. These citizens are gathered together on the page in a final civic communal experience, alphabetically, not by class nor age nor race: World War II Vet beside murdered Central City youth beside Uptown matron by overdose victim beside heartbreaking SIDS case. A unique collection joined together for the first and last time. Day after day, a new cohort arrives on your porch, and it doesn’t matter where they end up, in a recycling bin with the tin cans or blown down a gusty sidewalk, they all face that fate together.