A way of looking at obituaries - The Good Byline

Art Journal Pages - magazine scraps and
sympathy card pieces (from my grandfather's passing)

Sooner or later we all find ourselves in the position to clean out our loved ones homes and we need to decide on what to keep and what to get rid of. Some of the material we take home with us to sort through at a later date because often it's to difficult to do at the time. Recently, while visiting with my mom she was going through one such box filled with the sympathy cards from her father's passing. Knowing that I was collecting scraps for my art journaling projects she offered to let me take what I wanted. That's how this piece started - with the irises from one of those cards.

The Good Byline, by Jill Orr, features Riley Ellison a young twenty something whose life is on hold after her long-time boyfriend has dumped her and left town. She's under-employed at a job that doesn't fully use her skills or talents, lives in a house inherited from her grandfather, and hasn't moved on from the break-up. "I was living a life I'd lost control over somehow, treading water in a self-designed purgatory." (p.95) She is rocked by the news that a childhood friend has committed suicide, and this girl's parents want her to write their daughter's obituary. Riley has experience with writing obituaries as her grandfather was a well known writer of them. The difficulty for Riley is that the police ruled her grandfather's death a suicide and she has always struggled to believe he was capable of taking his own life. She can't come to grips that her friend has done the same, and she would be right - she didn't. I'll let you read about how Riley manages to unravel the mystery.

The point is about the obituary. If you've read some of the more popular self-help books, they advise writing your own obituary as a way to set goals for your life. Riley's grandfather often told her that obituaries were about life and not death. Sprinkled throughout the book are quotes from obituary writers such as this one from Jim Sheeler, "What can I learn from this life that will impact my own life?" (p.111) I thought that was a powerful question. In our grief we are often blinded by the loss of life and forget to remember the joy of the life lived. That consolation comes with time. When I work on an art journaling piece, I pour through the clips of words and phrases that appeal to me and begin to put them together with images. Little did I know that I would take pieces of a sympathy card and weave them into a piece that encourages the choice of living life to the fullest when you find yourself in a dark place (just when all hope seems lost). As Riley and I both learned, you have to live life to the fullest in order to provide lots of great material for your obituary.