Passing It On

Pre-obituaries aren’t just for the famous

Here’s a little secret you may not know: If you’re a famous person, chances are good that your local newspaper has already written your obituary. When you actually die, they’ll fill in a few blanks, do a quick update and press a button. Presto! You’re in the paper!

Unfortunately, for the very-much-alive Apple CEO Steve Jobs, an itchy finger at Bloomberg prematurely pressed that button recently. Although this was a major embarrassment for Bloomberg, Jobs was afforded a sneak peek at what others might say about him after he dies.

Wouldn’t you like that opportunity? Well, with a little foresight and preparation, you can.

Less-famous people than Jobs can enjoy the same perk of a pre-obituary by creating their own. After all, you’ll be paying for that space in the paper, why not fill it with your own words? Obviously, you need to do this before you expire, so get started. The work you do today will spare your grieving relatives the burden of having to do it in a time of extreme emotional duress.

Most personal historians are well-equipped to provide this service. Send me an e-mail and I’ll try to find one for you in your area. Here are some of my earlier posts on the subject.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories (and writes pre-obituaries). To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo of Steve Jobs paper toy courtesy of ♥ China ♥ guccio.

Breaking news from the death beat

This just in from the WWM News Bureau: You are going to die.

Sorry to be so direct, but one of the unavoidable side effects of living is dying. It’s one of those life experiences that we all share, regardless of our ethnicity, social standing or overall lifestyle. But we differ greatly in how we prepare for the ultimate reckoning.

That is why there are so many euphemisms for death and dying. Many of us see it as a transition from the material world to a spiritual one. Thus phrases such as “crossing over” and “passing on.” Religious people might prefer “called home by the Lord” or “soaring with the angels.” The poetic among us may opt for something like those words penned by William Shakespeare in Macbeth, “out, out, brief candle.”

There are plenty of euphemisms available and, in this era of paid obituaries, you’ve probably seen plenty in your local newspaper. In my days as a newspaper reporter, there was just one way to refer to a person’s demise: “John Doe died.” There was no dying suddenly, either. As a journalism professor noted: “All deaths are sudden. You’re alive one minute and dead the next.” And you’ll never find a newspaper person writing about how a dead person has entered heaven since that’s a non-verifiable piece of information.

While living, we have the opportunity to make our preferences known. Chances are good that payment for your own obituary will come out of your estate. Shouldn’t the words come from you as well?

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people write their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo courtesy of The Library of Congress.

Your life deserves more than six words

We’re born. We live. We die.

That may sum up our lives in six words but it doesn’t really differentiate our lives from the billions of other we(s) out there. For most of us, our obituaries are the final words of our personal history. For that reason, I encourage people to write their own obituaries or to work with a personal historian to have it done to your standards.

After all, who knows your life better than you? Wouldn’t you really rather take the time while you have it to distill your life to 250 or so meaningful words rather than having someone you’ve never met do it after you’re gone?

I wrote about this topic after attending an obituary writing workshop at the Nashville conference of the Association of Personal Historians last November. Obituary writing is an art form that is disappearing from the pages of many U.S. newspapers. Fortunately, personal historians have stepped up to ensure that everyone has access to a skilled professional that can create a memorable final tribute.

Many of the professional obituary writers in the U.S. belong to the fledgling Society of Professional Obituary Writers, which is having a workshop in Portland, Ore., on May 8-11. In conjunction with this workshop, awards will be presented to the best obituaries produced in 2007. The writers have graciously posted entries to this competition. Check them out to see what a well-crafted final tribute to a loved one can look like.

To find a personal historian in your area, go to the Association of Personal Historians web site.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of Horatio Baltz.

Don't let a little white lie tarnish your legacy

You’re probably familiar with the term “little white lie.” It’s possible that you’ve even told one or two in your lifetime. At their simplest, these little misstatements of fact are harmless and could even be considered helpful if they spare someone a dose of undue pain or suffering.

But what about those little white lies gone bad, when they lead to lie heaped upon lie to the point where you’re boxed in with no escape? Many television shows and movies have been built on this premise, usually with comical results. In real life, though, these situations are not always so funny.

Consider the case of Bill Henry, an 83-year-old Floridian whose obituary last fall told of his exploits as a major league pitcher. It outlined his 16 years in the bigs, including a couple of games in the 1961 World Series. He would drag out an album of baseball cards to show friends, a cardboard shrine to his colorful past.

But none of it was true. The real baseball playing Bill Henry is still kicking around his native Texas at age 80.

How and why the Florida Bill Henry assumed his false baseball playing identity is still a mystery, even to his wife, who met him after the deaths of his first two wives and his children.

"I just took his word that that's who he was," she told the Lakeland Ledger. "I was married to somebody that maybe I didn't know."

Keep that in mind if there are little white lies lurking in your family history. It’s better to come clean now before some snoopy reporter uncovers them or your heirs are embarrassed by an erroneous obituary.

Larry Lehmer of When Words Matter is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, check out his web site, or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of Bright Tal.

Tidying up for the new year

It’s time to clean out the office in anticipation of a productive and prosperous 2008. Here are a few items of interest for your consideration.

Are you familiar with the Willard Suitcase Project? This fascinating project began when the Willard Psychiatric Center in New York was closed in 1995 after 126 years. Left behind in a pigeon-infested attic were nearly 400 suitcases, dusty testaments to long-forgotten former residents of the facility that began as the Willard Asylum in 1869.

In the years since, researchers have examined the contents of the suitcases and have pieced together the stories of their faceless owners. The result is a traveling public exhibit, “The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic,” which will be at the New York City Public Library through Jan. 31. A book by the same title will be available in January.

People do the darnedest things to their data. To learn about the guy who sprayed his hard drive with insect repellant or the woman who took her flash drive for a tumble with her laundry, check this out.

Hopefully this won’t happen to you, but some people have taken to selling family heirlooms to pay off their medical bills. Descendants of abolitionist John Brown found themselves in this predicament recently.

Many newspapers charge for obituaries these days. That’s the downside; the upside is that you have more control over what you can say since it’s essentially a paid ad. But, if you want to avoid bad word choices, like “gone to live with the angles,” or factual errors such as “Grandma was a descendant of [the childless] George and Martha Washington,” you might want to hire a pro. Here’s an article on the perils of paid obituaries.

Oh, to be a farmer. Chris over at The Genealogue reports that a study by Drs. Leonid and Natalia Gavrilova of Chicago shows that trim farmers with more than three children were more likely to live to see 100 than overweight city boys without kids. In fact, living on a farm "more than doubled a man's odds of living into the triple digits."

Larry Lehmer is founder and president of When Words Matter, a company that specializes in collecting stories and writing family stories. Check out his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of otbergo.

Life on the Death Beat: It’s not your parents’ obituary

There’s a maxim in journalism that goes roughly like this: “The average person is guaranteed of getting his name in the paper twice in his lifetime – when he’s born and when he dies. Don’t screw either of those up.”

For many of us, our public legacies reside in the obituaries that appear in print a day or two after our death. Hopefully, our families and others close to us will keep us in their hearts beyond that date, but those newsprint tributes are often the last written chapter to our life story.

The late British writer Quentin Crisp once said, “An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.”

I encourage people in my legacy letter writing classes to write their own obituaries. When faced with the challenge of condensing your life to 250 words or so it forces you to focus on those things most important to you. That focus is critical in writing a legacy letter or ethical will and is a good starting point for a full-blown personal history.

Plus, in these days of paid death notices, it’s important to document your life story in such a way that truly reflects your life as succinctly as possible.

I attended a workshop on obituary writing at the recent national conference of the Association of Personal Historians. Prize-winning obituary writers Larken Bradley (The Point Reyes Light), Alana Baranick (Cleveland Plain Dealer) and Kay Powell (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) lamented the paid-obituary trend and represented the finest of what is something of a dying breed at U.S. newspapers, the professional obituary writer.

Fortunately, APH members like myself can provide the same services that newspapers are abandoning. There’s also help available on line. Check out Obit magazine or the Obituary Forum run by Alana. She’s also co-written a guide to obituary writing, “Life on the Death Beat.”

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of Robert of Fairfax.