Every Sunday I faithfully read the obituaries appearing in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
Many of them say nothing about the kind of life that the deceased lived. But those which describe vital career and personal details can be fascinating.
Often, I wish I’d known the person. Recently, I read of a woman my age also from a rural community who “loved tennis and cross-country skiing in her younger years” as I once did. She had an interest in writing, as well. Perhaps if we’d met, a friendship might have developed.
Once I read of a man who greatly resembled my late husband, Earl. This gave me a start. I thought it unlikely anyone else had successfully bridged a business and academics career along with being a clergyman as Earl did.
The page-long obituaries are the ones that I turn to first. Most describe the accolades of a celebrity or locally important person—but not all. Some are about someone quite ordinary with several hobbies and humble achievements, all precious to the surviving family members and important to the deceased.
I always stop when I read of someone from a rural community like mine who “attended a one-room rural school till 7th grade.” I fondly recall my best friend Ardis and other “country kids” who did this as well.
From time to time, someone will have the courage to mention that the deceased took his own life. Or that “she remained sober for 20 years.” Only once have I read “passed away of a broken heart.”
A photograph accompanying an obituary is commonplace today. I’ve become quite adept at guessing the person’s age based on a high school photo. The hairstyle is a dead giveaway for the era in which they graduated, as are the pose and background.
Many people with the same last name sometimes appear in the same obituary. In our Scandinavian area one rarely sees more than one Dalrymple or Stackpole, but many a Johnson or Anderson.
In a recent Sunday there were 57 obituaries. A quick canvas revealed occupations ranging from bank president to carpenter to project manager to tennis instructor. I wonder what it would have been like had each of these people met the other sometime in their life. Well, so goes my imagination.
Invariably, and sadly, I sometimes do come across the name of someone I once knew. Also, the relative of that person.
Back in my airline stewardess days, I received obituaries over the telephone. Whenever one of our Northwest pilots died, one of his peers would telephone each crew member to inform them of the funeral arrangements. Without fail, those calls came in late evening, sometimes after I’d retired for the day. It got so that if the phone rang at 10:30pm, my husband would say, “Carol, do you suppose another pilot died?”
I have no idea why I read the Sunday paper obits, but I find I am not alone. At least three other friends in my 80ish age bracket have confessed to doing the same thing. . . And none of us think it’s morbid!
Carol Hall lives in Woodbury. She’s a longtime freelance writer, a University of Minnesota graduate and a former Northwest Airlines stewardess. Hall’s book, Stewardess, relives the golden age of airline travel in the 1960s when she was a stewardess for Northwest Airlines. It is available for sale on Amazon.com.
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