By Kelly McMasters
Ms. McMasters is the author of “The Leaving Season: A Memoir.”
I wrote my obituary last week. I often do so once a year; it has become a kind of ritual.
I’ve met a few others who do the same or something similar. A teacher I know likes to start every new year by writing her obituary or what she hopes it will look like by year’s end. Another friend writes hers on Rosh Hashana. Recently a close friend wrote his life story as part of the process to get on the kidney transplant waiting list, and it occurred to me that’s exactly what their paragraphs resembled: a living obituary.
The first time I wrote my obituary, I was 12 years old. This was not a school assignment or a dramatic lark. My mother was training as a volunteer at our local hospice, and she was required to write her own obituary, an imaginative exercise as preparation to work with terminally ill patients. This assignment was jolting enough to cause some volunteers to quit the training, but my mother stuck with it, and the idea sparked with me immediately.
At the dinner table, my parents and I talked over my mother’s assignment to help her brainstorm. Later that night, I huddled in bed scratching out my own. My aunt, a reporter and photographer, gave me my first journal a few years earlier, and it felt like a natural extension of my daily scribbles. I followed the format of my mother’s assignment: the facts, including age and home; survivors; achievements in work or school; and finally, community, or how people might remember me.
My mother continued to work in hospice for the next 20 years, and I continued to write my obituary on a mostly annual basis, even after she stopped volunteering. As I grew to accept that every patient my mother met would soon die, some within hours of their meeting and others after months, I also came to understand that most people outside our house could not tolerate talking much about death, especially their own.
The result of this ritual obituary writing is not as maudlin as it might seem. If you take a few minutes to try it, you might find the same. In about a page or so, I usually end up with a gentle accounting of the year, held against all the past ones. I found many of the accomplishments that felt precious one year were hardly worth a mention the next.
Some years are short and perfunctory; some swell with joy and hope, pride even. There is a comfort in the accumulation, like the stacking of blocks — daughter, wife, mother of one, mother of two. And owning up to the unstacking, too, such as divorces, difficult moves, disruptions and the deaths of others in your life.
In years that feel lacking, sometimes I’ll write an aspirational obituary. Imagining I’ve lived to 94, I’ll throw a Ph.D. behind my name, maybe a lottery win, a huge bequest to my local library. Though even the most fanciful versions — I got my pilot’s license! I went on an archaeological dig! I owned a country house on the coast of Ireland! — tick off flashy accomplishments and accumulations quickly before settling down into the meat of it: who and what are left behind.
Certain years have passed without my being able to come to the page for this exercise in any form: the year after September 2001 (I was in the World Trade Center the day of the attacks), more recently the hardest years of my marriage and divorce. I could not write my obituary at all in the thick of the pandemic; as a single parent to two kids, the fear of death that gripped me in the spring of 2020 clouded my ability to steel myself enough for what no longer felt like an exercise.
When I finally returned to the practice, the space of 24 months felt elastic and warped. I had the feeling of writing around a black hole. Work and community had been replaced by the cycle of hatching butterflies or dough rising, the unwieldy length of my son’s hair or the changing color of my own, different ways of keeping time.
Most years, though, writing my obituary brings a kind of comfort. While obituaries are traditionally public documents, meant to measure posthumous impact, scratching them into my journal gave me a chance to measure a more intimate impression. This private accounting wasn’t predicated on newsworthiness or fact. When I flip through my old obituaries, I am flipping through past versions of myself. In many ways, they are as good as dead, unreachable former selves, and I find solace in being able to say hello.
This year writing my obituary felt more solemn than usual. I thought perhaps my younger son’s losing his last baby teeth had me feeling wistful or maybe the general anxiety swirl of the election cycle was clouding the ritual. But in writing that first line — always my name and age of death — I realized: I was about to be 48, the same age as my aunt, the one who gave me my first journal, when she died. And at 14, my oldest son was my exact age when I lost her. That she meant so much to me in such a short time gives me a hope I didn’t know I needed.
In the documentary “Obit,” about the obituary section of The New York Times, the reporter Margalit Fox says, “Obituaries have next to nothing to do with death and absolutely everything to do with life.” It seems dreadfully unfair that we wait until after our deaths to write them and never get to read them ourselves. Writing your obituary while you’re still alive can offer clarity about your life and, mercifully, if you find something lacking, you still have time to revise.
I’m grateful my mother brought the practice of looking at death this way to the dinner table all those decades ago and continued to do so through all the stories of her dying patients after that. Just as my aunt taught me the value of keeping a journal, my mother’s obituary exercise taught me the practice and value of holding death close, so I could remember to live.