Obits are for the sake of the living, not the dead. When a person dies, especially if they are very old, their appaerance may not actually reflect the person they were or the life they lived. A picture of them in good health, at a hapopy point in their life often makes a more suitable “remembrance” than a picture of them in weakness, pain and disability.
For my pic, I want that one of me mooning the camera, at the beach in 1982 when I was 21… yeah…
Grin
FML
My mother is 94. She says that she feels the same age on the inside that she has always felt. She still acts very young and enjoys her male companion.
I’m 64 and sometimes I’m almost startled to realize that I’m not forty anymore – or thirty – or twelve. So far, it does all feel the same. Maybe I’ll have a photo made especially for the occasion. Maybe I’ll be holding a peace sign. Go out protesting!
Cite??
Not till I’m dead!
Grin
FML
How long did your employment in this line of work last?
Here in the Balkans, it is traditional to post notices when someone dies. There’s a picture of the person, a short elegy, and at the bottom, an announcement of when the funeral is. Then they repost them at regular intervals (30 days, 90 days, 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, etc). The end result is that there are notices everywhere. People stick them on their doors in plastic binders, on windows, telephone poles, you name it. (This is what keeps photocopying places in business, I think. You can go in and choose a template and they’ll make everything up for you.)
Anyway, the pictures are usually of old people, so if it’s a young face, I usually stop to read it. Sometimes it is just an old picture, but that doesn’t make me mad, just kind of baffled. Isn’t the point to let someone know that their friend/acquaintance has died? Seems to me that posting a picture that people will immediately recognize is a better idea.
Damn those grieving widows and their selfish desires!
What the hell is wrong with reminding people how handsome their late husband used to be, especially if it brings them a mite of comfort?
In Ireland, the papers publish 25, 50, and 75 year memorial notices!
Twenty-five years as reporter and editor. My beef with obituaries is that they started out being actual news stories about the lives of people and have ended up being eulogies, and decietful ones at that. Families leave out important information because it’s inconvenient for them (for instance, the grieving children are actually step-children; divorce causes more confusion and disinformation in obituaries than anything else.) Families have omitted entire decades and whole careers because the widow or children didn’t enjoy that phase of the decedent’s life. Most of the obituaries – especially the paid ones – are almost entirely bullshit, and the only real facts in them are the dates of birth and death. I once had a widow irately demand that we reprint her husband’s obituary because we edited out that he “went to be with Jesus” and just said that he died. I told her if she wanted that printed, she had to buy an advertisement because none of my reporters was able to get Jesus on the phone and verify the claim.
I always read the first couple of lines of the obituaries because I enjoy the creative ways some of them say ‘died.’ “Passed away,” of course, is common, but we also get “is safe in the arms of our Heavenly Father” and every possible variation of “went to join Jesus.” My favorite (this is a military area, you know) was a retired USN Commander who 'shipped over for the last time."
I don’t mind the vintage photos, but it really peeves my mom for some reason. I think she thinks that if she has to live with her own old face every day, all the dead folks need to be forced to own up to theirs too.
But the photos that are merely dated rather than vintage are understandable. Lots of people don’t have formal photos done very frequently. In fact, until yesterday (when we had studio portraits done of her and my dad for their 50th anniversary), my parent’s most recent formal portraits were taken in 1988.
That’s telling her! The nerve of that widow!
Hell, they can use my LiveJournal default userpic for mine. It might be more easily recognized.
You have to be very anal retentive to get pissed about some stranger’s obituary. What the heck does it matter to you, if your not a close family member.
My Uncle ‘Tat’ passed this last Saturday. The picture that was posted in his obit was probably 20 years old or more. When I saw it, I thought “I’m glad they used that picture of him.” So I guess that’s my answer. He was a high school teacher, and I like the thought that some of his former students could see his picture and remember how he may have changed their life. This was in Henryetta, Oklahoma, by the way.
I don’t get the irritation with it myself, especially when it’s a total stranger, but it sure does make my husband cranky.
I admit I do get a little eye-rolly on the “Together Again” pictures, but I think people are entitled to be corny if they like.
A minor problem I have with decades-old photos in obituaries is that a lot of the time, I only know elderly people by one name — either their first name (for example, the morning coffee drinkers at the diner where I used to cook) or as Mr. or Mrs. Soandso. They pass away, and I don’t know about until somebody mentions it months later, even though I may have seen the obit. Because the old photo is 30, 40, or 50 years old, and I only met them within the last ten years, when they no longer looked anything like they did when the photo was taken.
I like the idea of running both an old and new photo.
See, this just illustrates my point that newspapers are no longer conveyers of real information and no one reads them in a search for truth. In fact, nobody really wants to know what’s true any more. We’re just image consumers. Even newspaper writers aren’t interested in digging up facts; they just want to sell a story, see how high on the page they can get it, see how fancifully they can write. It’s all about image. Where does the image-making end? If it’s OK to accept money from families to print an obituary full of supposition and outright lies, why shouldn’t we accept cash from the city council and let the City Manager write stories about the city? We’ll let anybody publish anything they want in the newspaper, as long as its paid for. We’ll just put “paid release” at the bottom of the story. And at what point do we completely forget about telling the truth? Or have we already?
We’re talking about two different issues here, editorial obituaries and paid obituaries. If it’s a paid obituary, the decedent’s family ought to have control over its content. The newspaper is always free to publish an editorial obituary on the decedent.
I had a co-worker who died recently of brain cancer. She was 48, and had been gone from work for almost a year before she died. The picture that ran with her obituary was obviously a very recent one, and she was barely recognizable. She had lost most of her hair and her face was very puffy and she looked much older. It was very, very hard to even tell who she was if you hadn’t seen her since she left work. Someone ended up finding a picture from when she was well and putting it up on a bulletin board so that people who might have just known her from seeing her in the hallways could put a face to her name.
I don’t think that they should have run a picture from when she was in high school, but a slightly less recent picture would have made it easier, rather than harder to identify her. I do wonder why her family chose that picture.
I think, for an elderly person, that the high school graduation or Army photo should be accompanied by a more recent photo, but it doesn’t have to be so recent that they look frail and sick.