274 Planning your own funeral redux

I woke up early hours Monday, Dec. 21 with chills and then fever. I spent the day with a dull headache wondering if I had it. First thing Tuesday, I went for a test and was confirmed positive. I am writing this on Thursday and am feeling like I am starting to get a cold but with little other symptoms. 

I have suspicions where I contracted it since a walking buddy went for a test after me and also showed positive. Now I remember she was complaining of feeling like she had a cold or allergies!

I have high hopes that I will continue with these minor complaints and nothing more. But I must confess my first thoughts were morbid and I revisited a blog I had posted in September 2018 to see where I stood on funeral planning. With your indulgence, I am reprinting it:

Planning Your Own Funeral

I have noticed recently that there are many obituaries in the newspaper with what looks like high-school photographs of people who were 70 or 80 years old when they died.

I am not sure anyone would recognize this photo as Trish Ridgeway if it were attached to an obituary. Of course, I am not in contact with many people that knew me in my younger days since I moved around as a Navy brat and changed locations every two years. I must say, however, that I have trouble picking my husband Harry out of a group picture from high school!

Of course, I googled obituary photographs and found plenty of advice about how to choose one. Plus one article noted that it is a recent trend to use much younger photos in obituaries.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer did a study of the use of obituary photos over time. “Obituaries and their photographs are one reflection of our society at a particular moment in time,” said Keith Anderson, co-author of the study and assistant professor of social work at Ohio State University. “In this case, we can get hints about our views on aging and appearance from the photographs chosen for obituaries. Our findings suggest that we were less accepting of aging in the 1990s than we were back in the 60s.”

I bet that few people have formal portraits made in old age. You see many blurry photos in obituaries that seem to be enlarged from a group candid shot.

In this Google search, I also found many websites that told you how to plan your own funeral. Many are purely mercenary, wanting to hook you up with lawyers or funeral homes, but I also discovered sites on the topic from the New York Times and Kiplinger's.

Everyone offers a checklist of what to do--writing down what type of burial or cremation, what type of service, eulogists, pallbearers, music, readings.

And, of course, the advice tells you to write your own obituary. I saw an ad for a four-week course on writing your own obituary. That seems a bit much to me! Do you want "just the facts, mam," a literary masterpiece, or something that reflects your humor and point of view?

Being an obsessive-compulsive type, I immediately started answering the questions in the checklists and writing my own obituary. When I discussed what I was doing with my husband Harry, we discovered that although we had generally discussed what we want, each of us had preferences the other did not know.

While I was thinking about all this, Senator John McCain's funeral was going on. Sen. McCain had time to think about and plan his funeral even though I imagined he and his family hoped it would be later than it was. If we die suddenly, imagine the stress of the grieving survivors trying to plan a funeral in usually less than a week after the death. We usually spend a year or more planning a wedding or other special event!

So it makes sense to plan ahead and make sure your wishes are available immediately to loved ones. That means don't put the plans in a lockbox!

A morbid subject to be sure but one to think about. Now I have to go back and add more humor to my obituary! 

Back to 2020, still being compulsive, I reviewed my planning list and my draft obit--it still needs more humor!

                                                     Trish

273 Holidays 2020?

Holidays 2020?

If I may first make you smile, I will give you a brief overview of our Thanksgiving this year. I bought a turkey breast and the “fixins” to do a two­-person traditional dinner. 

Dear husband decided he would rather stay in his recliner and watch tv. Suited me just fine to stay out of the kitchen! Went to Sheetz for a ham sub and a turkey sub. ‘Twas a great way to stay relaxed. No prep and no clean up work. Talked to various children on the phone later in the evening. Amen. The end.

Now, it is time to prepare for the COVID holiday. I like this mug but didn’t buy it because I am not paying $25 plus shipping and handling, but it is a clever representation of life in America right now. 

We have a tree this year. It’s about two-feet-plus tall with little white lights and I put a gold ribbon bow on the top to match the gold bow on our one wreath. This is just for us to enjoy. No one will be visiting. We long to see our NYC contingent but that is surely a no-go! 

Dear husband’s family reunion is always held on December 26th when relatives from far and wide have gathered. No, not this year. This is the first year in our 43-year marriage that the reunion has been canceled. It is a fun time, but the recluse in me goes late, leaves early but seeing everyone and hearing a few stories does make for a special time. Maybe next year.

Amazon loves me as does Children’s Salon and Sephora and Harry and David and Virginia Diner and the Milk Bar pastry shop, etc., etc., etc. The gifts purchased from said stores were either shipped directly to the recipients or will be left on various porches around town. I am staying safe rather than sorry – and we wear masks AND gloves!

So, you ask, “What on earth is she doing with the extra time?” Reading, reading, still working on cleaning out the storage room (four months – not finished), reading, duplicate bridge online, and reading. Oh, playing piano a bit, but fear the muscle memory in the fingers has r e a l l y slowed down. Yes, and reading.

I decided to go back to some classics that I read in college days and probably did not appreciate or truly understand. Proust! Proust is the one. He was born in a Parisian suburb in 1871 to a noted scientist father and a well-educated mother who loved the classics. 

As a child, Proust was a hypersensitive (read hypochondriac) small-sized asthmatic. He, however, did manage to obtain a philosophy degree. In his home, he lined his bedroom with cork to block the noise of Paris life and wrote all night and slept all day. (from Carter, W.C. Marcel Proust: A Life, Yale books, 2002) 

I started with Swan’s Way, the first volume in what is collectively known as In Search of Lost Time. His writing has these long, convoluted sentences which remind me of reading Faust in German in my college days. Go to the end of the sentence or the semi-colon and try to find a verb to give context to all those other phrases. Nevertheless, it is so worth the effort. If I am correct, Proust’s life premise is that ART can withstand the destructive forces of time and place. Boy, do we need that thought this year!

From the same Proust book, Carter explains that Proust saw a relationship between sensation and memory, and to enhance this reality one needs visual images. Proust’s visualizations apparently were often based on paintings he knew and his memories of them, just as the smell of tea and madeleine cookies recalled his childhood times with his grandmother. (Sound familiar, doesn’t it?) The rather highbrow term for this is “aesthetic analogies.”

Proust also had a dark, droll sense of humor. He notes that if one finds something tried does not work, try something else. He, however, admits to continuing to make the same mistakes over and over. Sometimes sad, sometimes funny. 

I must acknowledge Vanity Fair magazine whose last page always features a Proustian questionnaire of a noted person. It is the first thing I read each month. The questionnaire was not original to Proust, but was a Victorian parlor game so all the guests would participate in  conversation. Proust answered the questions which were found in the papers of French President Felix Faure. It was an album belonging to Faure’s daughter from 1924. It was sold in 2003 for $113,000 at auction. The questionnaire is used for interviews and college admissions and parlor games today. (Wikipedia/ProustQuestionnaire, accessed December 4, 2020) 

My holiday present to you is a copy of the questionnaire. Use it on Zoom, Skype, or the phone, ask a question at the mailbox when you see a neighbor (six feet apart, of course). It’s fun and can be illuminating! Merry, merry and happy, happy, and hoping for a better 2021.

Glenne

The Proust Questionnaire

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
2. What is your greatest fear?
3. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
4. What is the trait you most deplore in others?
5. Which living person do you most admire?
6. What is your greatest extravagance?
7. What is your current state of mind?
8. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
9. On what occasion do you lie?
10. What do you most dislike about your appearance?
11. Which living person do you most despise?
12. What is the quality you most like in a man?
13. What is the quality you most like in a woman?
14. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
15. What or who is the greatest love of your life?
16. When and where were you happiest?
17. Which talent would you most like to have?
18. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
19. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
20. If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
21. Where would you most like to live?
22. What is your most treasured possession?
23. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
24. What is your favorite occupation?
25. What is your most marked characteristic?
26. What do you most value in your friends?
27. Who are your favorite writers?
28. Who is your hero of fiction?
29. Which historical figure do you most identify with?
30. Who are your heroes in real life?
31. What are your favorite names?
32. What is it that you most dislike?
33. What is your greatest regret?
34. How would you like to die?
35. What is your motto?