Wrestling With an Ocean

“You know what I’d really like to get good at? Writing obituaries,” said no one I have ever known.

It isn’t even the gloom associated with the task, the necessity of dwelling on a sad reality for a sustained period of time. It’s the weight of it, the sense of responsibility for summing up, in the space of a few paragraphs, everything that a person was, did, meant, or loved. It’s like wrestling with an ocean; you can’t win, you can only hope you don’t get knocked flat too many times.

As communications director for a graduate school in the 2010s, it fell to me on a number of occasions to write the equivalent of an obituary for a notable person associated with the school—a faculty member, a student, a board member, a graduate. With time and experience, I learned the rhythms of structures of this distinct, uniquely charged genre, and came to understand what I might be equipped to contribute. Whether it was an anecdote, a quote from a peer, or a single, sharply drawn observation, I always looked for an opportunity to crystallize an emotional connection between the reader and the life I was describing.

I’ve never enjoyed the task of writing an obituary, but I’ve come to understand the basic requirements of the form, and recognize what I might bring to the task. When first Mom and then Dad passed away in the space of 20 months, my brother Gerry—also a writer—took the lead in drafting both obituaries, for which I’m eternally grateful. Still, I was glad to feel like I had some foundation of experience to draw on when offering input.

In that same timeframe, in this space, I began publishing a series of essays reflecting on my parents’ lives and chronicling my experience of grief. Over the course of three years those essays grew into a book—The Remembering: Reflections on Love, Art, Faith, Heroes, Grief and Baseball. One of the things that I came to understand while on that journey was that the act of writing was helping me to process my grief, transmuting sadness into creation, loneliness into connection.

Meanwhile, through the heart of the pandemic, my wife Karen and I took care of our preschool- aged grandchildren three days a week. That concentrated time with little Nathan and Emma was the best medicine I could have been prescribed, and one of our many sources of entertainment during those long days together was the three cats Karen and I had brought with us from Sacramento when we moved to the Monterey area in 2009.

And then, in August 2020, the oldest cat (Snowball, top photo) died, the same month that we learned one of the other two had cancer—a slow-moving variety, but cancer. Four months later, the third kitty (Lucca, middle photo), who had seemed in good health, abruptly fell ill and soon passed away. Our four-legged cancer patient (Tirah the tabby, bottom photo) enjoyed two more good years of life, but eventually succumbed. I ended up writing what amounted to an obituary for each of these family members, in the form of Facebook posts.

As we talked about each of these losses with our grandson and granddaughter, as I sat at my desk each morning missing first one departed companion and then another, I did what had long since become a natural reflex when grief paid a visit.

I began to write.