obituary 12-11-11

Late last year, my biweekly men’s group decided that each of us would write his own obituary as a self-awareness exercise and bring it into the group for sharing and discussion. I wanted to write something grand that projected a wonderful future in which my struggles and sacrifices were validated and my dearest dreams came true in coming years, but for whatever reason, taking that approach did not feel authentic to me.

Creating a linear narrative with a list of accomplishments in the classic obituary format didn’t work for me either. As an alternative, I decided to approach the exercise as if my life had ended that very day and simply write whatever came to me in response to the event. Here is the result:

obituary 12-11-11

he was a horse of a different color
he was an army of one
he was a stone on a river bottom
he was a bird that fell out of the nest.

he was an A student
he was the smartest guy in the class
he was a tax deduction
he was a paycheck.

he was a castaway
a fugitive
a superhero
a cowboy
a jet pilot
a soldier
a time traveler
a family of astronauts
a secret identity.

he was an alien from another planet
who fell to earth.

he felt confused a lot
he felt like he didn’t belong
he felt like something was missing
he couldn’t wait to grow up
even after he grew up.

he fell in love with women
who didn’t love him back
he fell in love with women
who lied to him
he fell in love with women
who cheated on him
he fell in love with women
who didn’t appreciate him
he fell in love with women
who couldn’t see him
or let him be who he was.

he lived for 15 years without loving anyone at all
(he never saw that one coming)
he kept trying
he got tired of trying
and sometimes he stopped trying
but he never stopped looking.

he wanted to help
he wanted to make a difference
he wanted everything to be better
for everybody
he couldn’t understand why people lied
so much and so often
when it took so little effort
to tell the truth
he couldn’t understand why people were
so mean to one another
when it took so little effort
to be kind.

he was a prisoner
he was a punching bag
he was a scapegoat
he was an exile.

he was a flower in a jar
a damaged romance
a beast in the night
a cave full of bats.

he put it all on the line
he gave everything he had
to everything he did
he lived at the edges of his edges
he fell many times
and was broken many times
in many ways
but he always got back up.

he was a sand castle in a tsunami
a beam of moonlight landing on a blade of grass
an erupting volcano
a still mountain stream
a quiet moment that passed
in the twilight.

now the wave that brought him here
has taken him back
he was ahead of his time
he was ahead of the pack
he was never sure he mattered at all
but he did.

(PDF version)

For reasons I can’t fully articulate or even understand, this poem feels incredibly personal to me and I feel incredibly vulnerable, almost naked, sharing it. I declined to share it in the men’s group the first time we brought our obituaries in for discussion, saying I was unhappy with mine and planned to rewrite it. However, there was no rewrite because when I sat with the task, nothing else ever came through, and I finally decided that what I’d written must be what I was supposed to write at this time.

I would still like to write that rosy “dreams fulfilled late in life” obit, and maybe I will at some point, but I guess I had to write this one first.

The obituary 12-11-11 by Rick Belden, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.