One of the 10 auto/biographies I’d like to write is “an obituary for every year of my life, imagining I’d died in that year.”
I first thought of the idea of writing my own obituary about five years ago, shortly after I discovered the Oxford Muse and started to think seriously about serial autobiography.
[I've since discovered that the idea is not original - several other thinkers have suggested that a good way of evaluating your life would be to imagine that you've just died, and to think about what your obituary would say.]
To date, I’ve only written one obituary about myself, and it’s dated Sunday, November 23, 2003. Click here to read it.
Re-reading it today, a few things occurred to me:
- In many ways, the obituary absolutely sums up my concerns at the time of writing – career anxieties, conflicting priorities, a sense of my own arrogance. Re-reading the document brought back a lot of uneasy memories.
- An obituary normally tells the story of a person’s public life, not their inner one. This requires the person to have done something, anything, worthy of public note. Because my story at that time was one of unfinished works and undecided futures, I was compelled to tell more of my inner narrative – my anxieties and doubts. Many of these were not manifested in public, so in some senses this piece transgresses the rules of the form.
- Family plays a very marginal role in this autobiographical narrative. I think my parents were quite upset when they read the obituary, and I understand why. This narrative was meant to sum up my life, yet my parents come and go in just two sentences. This is both inaccurate and unfair, but perhaps it goes some way to conveying what my preoccupations were at the time. If I had written an obituary for the years 2004-8, it might have been possible to trace the evolution of my priorities. Nowadays, the autobiographical narratives I like to tell myself are all about family.
- Performance plays a central role in my autobiographical narratives from this time. In the obituary, I’m survived by my “much-loved” tuba, which now sits in the corner of our bedroom, covered in clothes.
- I still love romantic comedies set in American High Schools.