Kansas City, Missouri, where I live, is a sophisticated big city with the proverbial small-town heart. Sometimes I feel like I know everybody, which is one reason I read the obituaries in the newspaper every day. Usually, if someone I actually do know happens to die, I hear about it another way. But the obituaries bring to my attention the details (or not) of the lives of people I might have known in the past, or wish I’d known and never did. I’m reminded that for someone out there, my obituary will be my one and only statement of what I learned, believed, and lived out about the meaning and purpose of life. Heavy!

This puts my little life in perspective. I’ve written and rewritten my own obituary a number of times. I keep the document on my computer desktop–relatives reading this, please note! At the moment, my obituary is admittedly a bit tongue-in-cheek. But what a good exercise in setting today’s priorities.

So…sit down soon and write your own obituary. Please keep it short and sweet.

THE SOURCE

 

When first I walked out of the ocean
I took with me currents cold and hot,
and silken hands that slid like summer
over the wide back of the sand. I took
the fringe where fishes dart,
the whales’ slow rhythm, struts
of lost ships bringing treasures, and
a singing of the conquests yet to come.
I took the rivers’ penetrating flow, the deeps
where none but eyeless, breathless
creatures go, the urgency of huge migrations, life
that comes in countless little deaths I do not know.

 

 

Barbara Loots
published in Cedar Rock