Friday, February 11, 2005

Reading the Names

During a spare moment on Monday, I skimmed the South Bend Tribune, and like a sun-blind visitor who ducks into a chapel and settles into a pew to rest before realizing that a solemn service is underway, I found myself reading the obituaries. I’m not normally drawn to them. Some readers turn to them first, either to scan for familiar names or to play the game of fleshing out in their imaginations the lives so faintly outlined in the brief biographies. I lingered over the columns of text, trying to see, through the obscurity of the formal prose, some glimmers of the stories animating the lives.

Like any utilitarian public discourse, the obituary article is formulaic. Its conventions serve to satisfy our desire to know as well as the family’s desire to tell. Monday’s paper printed seven obituaries, all of women, most quite elderly. Permit me to pronounce their names: Mary L. Clemmons, born 1914; Eva M. Dwyer, born 1910; Cecilia Goosens, born 1912; Helene E. Hafron, born 1911; Jeannine L. Koenig, born 1935; Yvonne W. Schall, no date of birth provided, but she was 87; and Ernestine Strickland, born 1925. Photos and stories are nice, but naming the dead is the simplest form of reverence, and that is the great service of the obituary page. The text of each obituary follows a pattern. First it tells how old the woman was, which is always interesting. I’m young enough to take comfort in their longevity: in the great expanse of their lives, I seem to see the green meadows of my own existence rolling ahead for miles. I enjoy the sense of security, as though these seven women are my guardians—sentinels on the borderland where my own life meets the strange country I’m riding toward.

The obituary tells me where each woman lived at the time of her death. This precise address prevents us from making an embarrassing misidentification. Nothing in the pattern of information is accidental. The same purpose, among others, is served by listing the names of the surviving family members and also those who “preceded” the deceased in death. This helps me answer the question, “Is this a funeral I ought to attend?” If so, then I can read about the funeral arrangements, the services, and the memorial gift fund. Meanwhile I follow the story. I learn the woman’s birthplace, where she lived before moving here, when and whom she married and sometimes where. I learn, for instance, that Cecilia Goosens was born in Poland, that Mary Clemmons and her husband “enjoyed nearly 60 years of marriage until his passing,” and that Helene Hafron married her husband “on Aug. 13, 1935, at the Log Chapel on the Notre Dame campus.” The articles cover their education, employment, hobbies, and memberships. Ernestine Strickland, called by the nickname “Tiny,” worked as a waitress for 23 years at the Ewing Café. Eva Dwyer “was well known for her beautiful flower gardens” and at one time “an article appeared in the Tribune about her gardens.” Mrs. Yvonne Schall “was an avid bridge player, a member of the Colony Club and the Duplicate Club.” It’s possible to come across a detail so intimate and touching that it lingers in my mind, such as the fact that all five of Jeannine Koenig’s children and seven grandchildren “were present at the time of her death.”

But any obituary can too easily convey the false impression that each ordinary life is reducible to eight column inches in the South Bend Tribune. Finally what I feel is this: here are seven women whom I’ll never know, among all the people who are dying, here and elsewhere, like you and me, each of us inhabiting a name, and each name like a title in boldface type above a story that is largely untold, each name crying out for its own story, calling, perhaps helplessly, for the hand of one who can transform it into a narrative that can be retold—each name that kind of human cry.

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on February 11, 2005
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