As soon as I could read well enough to read on my own, I became an avid fan of the obituaries. Every Sunday morning, I would purloin the obit section from the family Star Ledger and run my finger down the columns proclaiming death. First I would hunt for last names I recognized.
Then I would carefully read each one, absorbing such odd tidbits as age, family members, and arrangements. I did this throughout my childhood and adolescence fairly consistently with occasional breaks. I was not a particularly morbid child in any other respect. I didn't run off torturing animals or ripping leaves off of trees or sucking blood. I liked reading about death.
Perhaps it was a natural outgrowth from my interest in biographies. The grammar school librarian-- she had lost one leg to cancer and got along on crutches-- used to allow me to help her put the books back from the returns and the stacks. I liked doing it and got good at it. I found the biographies that way. I can still see the school library quite clearly in my mind's eye and where the biographies were located. It was a series designed to stimulate interest in the sciences perhaps. I remember I read Marie Curie's and I went on to read Thomas Alva Edison, and Louis Pasteur. There were others too which I cannot recall.
Some years later when we had gone off to our separate hells in high school hallways, I was visiting a couple of friends from those days. One of them told me that Miss Davis was dead. They had cruelly kept this from me, deciding somehow that I had been too delicate to share in the mourning that they had been privileged to. Odd that.
Looking back, I was probably the kid most acquainted with death. I certainly had dealt with it. My maternal grands had a retirement dairy farm where life, sex, and death were routine. My step-grandmother had dragged me off to the wakes of her dead friends with no trouble. I truly didn't mind the rituals associated with death and even enjoyed them. I understood something about the value of public mourning and was offended when it was denied to me by the well-meaning conspiracy of two friends who really didn't know me well at all.
sapphoq on life
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