Summing it Up

The Atlantic recently published an in-depth feature on George Vaillant, the chief psychiatrist behind the legendary Grant study which in 1937, picked 268 Harvard men to follow their lives in as much detail as possible - through marriages, careers, personal relationships and the onset of old age. The study was meant to uncover the secret to that elusive mental state we call happiness. Worth a read. But what struck me most were the beautifully written case studies (No. 158 is my favourite), each trying to capture a lifetime’s worth of contradictions, self-doubt, defiance and finally resignation with an unabashed literary flair which I discovered is strangely the norm for such scientific studies.

Obituaries too attempt something similar and obituary writing is considered by many to be an art form – transforming seemingly mundane lives into engaging narratives that can be inspiring, tragic, humourous or plain playful, depending on what the client desires. There’s even an online magazine called Obit which pays tribute to everything related to death. Or you can head to Relationship Obit if you wish to mourn a recent heartbreak or bitch about an ex.

This very human need to give a concrete form to life’s intangibles is a way of convincing ourselves that memories, if not people, are eternal (they’re not). It’s almost as if the obituary is what makes the experience/person real and not the other way around. It got me thinking about what my obituary would look like if I died today. I actually found the exercise to be quite therapeutic. I think obituaries are often written in third person but I liked the Grant study style a lot more. Here’s what I came up with -

From as way back as you can remember, you placed implicit faith in the force of your own uniqueness. Your relatively uneventful and happy childhood was distorted into a seemingly more difficult period through the prism of your fertile imagination. As you grew older, the dawning realization that you were only as special as the limited scope of your experiences granted you, threw you into a dizzying spate of approval-seeking childish transgressions that in later years, you successfully repressed with equal fervor. Professionally, you reaped only as much as you sowed, which wasn’t a lot. You attributed it to your rather optimistic view of life where opportunities are endless and time and chance will always be on your side. You were much loved by a few and liked to think you were misunderstood by many. Asked about the general opinion that people had of you, you observed indifferently, “I guess I’m not everybody’s cup of tea.”