The first clue probably should have been on this same nephew’s birthday, when I showed up with Paper Jamz, both the guitar version and the drum set.  (At least I didn’t buy him an actual drum set. Although the thought has occurred to me.)

I don’t know why I’m the kind of person who thinks strapping trampolines to the feet of a hyperactive second grader is a good idea, but there you have it.  I just figured he’d enjoy it.

I took Friday off, because I typically do take December 10th off when it falls on a work day. Friday was the 7th anniversary of my mom’s death from lung cancer. It would also have been her 58th birthday.  So really, there’s no getting around thinking about Mom that day.

I’ve found that it’s generally best if I just avoid any situation where my inexplicably bursting into tears would be an unrecoverable social error.  But I figured people burst out crying while doing Christmas shopping all the time; so no biggie there!

On the whole, it wasn’t a bad day.  I got a very large portion of my Christmas shopping completed. So that was a major weight off my mind.

I bought my dog a tuxedo. Because, seriously, if ever a dog was crying out for formal wear, it’s mine.

In hindsight, I probably should have gone with a hoodie sweatshirt instead. Leaping straight into formal wear with someone who is not accustomed to even wearing underwear was probably a miscalculation roughly comparable to strapping trampolines onto kids’ feet.

I spent a little time with my sisters, who all also happened to be off and hanging at the youngest’s house.

P.S. Lest you think I’m the worst sister ever, I did actually call and ask permission to buy my nephew those Moon Shoes.  My sister’s response was “Well, he bounces around like that anyway. Probably just save his knees some wear and tear.”

This blog is all about stories, especially personal stories, so obituaries are actually something relevant.  In my first job out of high school, I was a small town radio DJ.  One of my most important duties (after keeping the GM from putting his foot in his mouth) was reading off the obits as part of the noon news report.  You want to seriously torque off small town old people?  Mess up an obituary.  That’s all I’m saying. The phones will ring, and you will spend 20 minutes getting dressed down for leaving out the deceased’s second cousin once removed who “stayed with her every day three years ago when she was down with the cancer.”

Sorry.  I digress.  For what it’s worth, my own life experiences eventually taught me to appreciate why it was so important to those folks that I get the obituaries right.

Anyway… local publications have always printed obituaries, obits drive a certain number of subscriptions, so to a certain extent, publishers have always profited from these notices.  Taylor may be doing so a bit more directly, but the fact remains, that those who serve the bereaved professionally in some capacity are essentially profiting from death.

That’s not what I really wanted to talk about here, though.  Whether you like what Jeff Taylor is doing or not, some time in your life, your name will likely be in the “survived by” list for someone close to you.  In the last four or five years, I’ve personally lost my mom, my grandpa, and my grandma  (all three to tobacco-related illness;  so, yes, I basically think Tobacco Companies = Satan).  I’ve also lost to some aunts, uncles, and other more distant relations over the years.

Bereavement is a really difficult life passage.  Obituaries aren’t really for the deceased; they’re for the bereaved.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  stories are how we process and contextualize our lives.  We find the meaning for our little adventures here on earth by telling ourselves the story of those adventures.  Sometimes they are comic and sometimes they are tragic, and sometimes a mixture of both.  An obituary is effectively the epilogue of someone’s story, told for the benefit of those left behind.

We need an ending, or in psychology-speak, we need “closure,” when someone we love’s story is cut off.  Obituaries and other memorials are symbolic “endings” that help us process the loss.  My theory is that our souls, being eternal, don’t really ”get” death.  They need symbols to make sense of what has happened.

During my mother’s passing, the funeral home and both newspapers which printed her obituary misspelled her name.  Despite the great care we took to spell her unusual name and have the spelling read back to us, both the funeral home and the Courier-Journal actually misspelled both her first and last names (there was no listing for “Reginia Beckham”–just “Regina Beckman”).  In an already painful time, it was an insult added to injury.  I tried to contact an editor at the C-J for a correction, but got no response, and eventually decided a correction wouldn’t really make a difference.

It’s a small thing, really, but at the time it loomed a lot larger.  And it made me sorry for the way I had mentally blown-off those callers back when I was a know-it-all 18 year old deejay.