You know you are getting older when the first section of the Brandon Sun which is perused after it is retrieved from CANEX’s recycling is the obituary page.
As my journalism mentor Ken Giles from Brampton, Ont. once confided to me when I was starting out as a journalist at age 24, you’re checking the obits to see how many of your friends have died and, he would quip, to ensure your own moniker is not printed on the page alongside a photograph you would not have chosen to run with your last published words.
I used to laugh to myself when Ken would glean from the obits a few more of his aging buddies — he was only 50-something at the time — were soon to be planted six feet under and he would have to dust off his best suit again for another solemn trip to church, then the nearby cemetery.
One’s mortality becomes more pressing as you near or hit the half century mark I’m told. That’s how long my father lasted. And his father — my grandfather from Guyana, South America who I am named after — went even earlier at age 32.
These were young men, in my estimation, when they died compared to a 104-year-old First World War veteran who survived hell in the Somme or Vimy and then lived for more than a century.
With the death of my mother in the summer of 2005 from ovarian cancer and the earlier tragic death of a friend’s daughter in a two-car crash I witnessed on Hwy. 16 near Camrose, thoughts of my own death have occupied my imaginative mind. This is especially true after reaching the 64 mark Jan. 8, and have marked July 31 on the calendar as my retirement date. After all, I’ll be in my 65th year.
It doesn’t help I like to tour graveyards and cemeteries, and have spent time in many in the Westman and beyond. I often think of the people buried beneath the headstones or grave markers, wondering about what they did in life. Everyone has a story, but it goes silent once the heart stops beating.
Not one to plan and pay for my funeral ahead of time like my late mother, I have thought about different facets of one’s demise, like the actual funeral service or whether to be buried for all eternity in a coffin inside a cement vault. Or just be cremated. Both of my parents decided on cremation.
My father’s cremains are buried under a tree in a Toronto park, or scattered in Lake Ontario, while my mother’s ashes were scattered in the ocean near Nanaimo, BC.
Death is never embraced when you are young and healthy. Youth is about invincibility, with no thought to suddenly being laid out in a mortuary awaiting preparation for burial or cremation by the undertaker.
This baby boomer is adamant I don’t want to be put on display for viewing in a funeral home. A closed casket with framed photos of me alive and smiling on the lid works best for me if there was to be a funeral service. I prefer the new term — celebration of life. Remember me when I was living, not my departure due to death.
And no church music if there is a gathering. Instead, before my cremains are scattered in glacier-fed Comox Lake in Cumberland, BC, I want the funeral home to play some of my favourite tunes from ABBA, Fleetwood Mac, Jesse Cook or Supertramp.
As my closed casket is taken from the funeral home — no church or religious ceremony for me to close the chapter on my life — to the crematorium I’d like one final song to be played, Sarah McLachlan’s I Will Remember You.
Life is too short — enjoy it before the funeral director dresses you for one last time after injecting your body with formaldehyde — unless you want a green funeral, therefore, the body is chemical-free prior to burial in a shroud in a Victoria cemetery.
But when it comes to my obituary, if written for the Shilo Stag’s website years from now, please remember I died at age 75; I did not pass away at age 75 as funeral homes like to compose in newspaper obits,
Remember me as I lived, not in death.
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To think of one’s life starting as a baby left out in his high-chair to watch the Queen drive by at CFB Bagotville, Quebec, in the early 1960s, but not have a memory of it. Then six-decades later one is preparing to retire, and thoughts of one’s mortality come to mind when you are asked if you have life insurance. Or to be cremated or buried debate crops up among siblings and close friends. For me, cremation and toss my ash to the winds and let it settle in Comox Lake, BC, on Vancouver Island. A glacier-fed lake I swam in as a child when dad was posted to CFB Comox. Photo Doreen Xavier (nee Sampson)
