While strolling through Denver Botanic Gardens this spring, I noticed a memorial bench with a curious bronze plaque inscription: “Marilyn Hickle Shaw — “All mushrooms are edible … some only once.”
Did Marilyn actually die of ingesting poisonous fungi, only to have her friends highlight the tragic ending by dedicating a wood bench?
Seemed a bit ghoulish to me.
I decided to search for her obituary, so I Googled Marilyn’s name. As it turns out, her obituary reports that she was “an artist, a citizen scientist, and a mycology consultant who for 30-plus years performed all-hours, on-call poisonous mushroom identification for individuals and poison centers throughout the western United States.
“She died peacefully at age 94. Deadly mushrooms were not involved.”
Obituaries perform this kind of function. They inform, enlighten, and occasionally amuse.
Sometimes they say very little; other times they seem to reveal too much. All of them remind us of our impermanence, which is why we shouldn’t be surprised that obituaries are the most visited section in print newspapers. We’re more than a little curious about how close in age we might be to the most recently deceased.
For reasons not entirely clear to me, I collect quirky, offbeat obits. Some display interesting descriptions of death’s transition.
Otis Burchett Jr. “was reluctantly hauled into the hereafter by two heavenly, we hope, angels on November 27, 2022.”
Others seem overly candid.
Burton Cohen’s obituary indicates that memorial contributions in his name may be sent to Temple Israel, “where Burt set a record for non-attendance at Sabbath services.”
Some obituaries are just plain funny. Jack Haut “wanted the Chicago Bears to be his pallbearers, but they were busy letting all their other fans down so he opted for cremation rites instead.” We’re also told that he “would have excelled in high school athletics … but was held back by his lack of athleticism and size.”
A few obits address God directly. In Fern Sadd’s case: “Dear Lord, it is with regret that we must return your faithful servant to you.”
And then, there’s the joking brevity of the obituary of someone named Hokey Pokey, who “put his whole self in in 1934 and took his whole self out in 2022.”
The obituary for Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough delivers a miniature civics lesson at its close by using his own words: “Understanding the real world, being part of it and enjoying it, has mainly to do, I believe, with being a real person. That’s the point. It means taking an interest in other people, all kinds of people. It means enjoying people and trying to understand one another. It means kindnesses. It means doing what we can to move civilization forward, to make the world a little better place because we are in it.”
There is an age-old Jewish custom of people with children drafting a spiritual or ethical will (tvava’ot). The exercise is similar to writing an obituary, except that it’s often edited multiple times over the decades instead of initiated as an end-of-life project.
