'Joy always follows failures' - what else we can learn from obituaries

Part two of my chat with Mary McGreevy...

I’m hoping not too many people noted the ‘part two of my chat with Mary will be out on Friday’ in my last letter. As now it’s Sunday. Oops! I had grand ambitions to give you two newsletters this week! But life, and paid work, got in the way.

For those who are new here, I usually post on a Sunday (or a Monday if my weekend is busy) and there’s now going to be surprise extra posts for paid subscribers. I’d love to do more of this so if you can become a paid subscriber please do, or if you can’t, and enjoy my work, simply share it or recommend me! As that really, really helps too. Now… on with today’s letter, enjoy!

A note from me…

I’ve regretted rage that’s flown out of my mouth, red hot as flames, the thick smoke of my words, filling up the room. I’ve choke-cried, overwhelmed by my circumstances (or mistakes) not knowing if – with this release of salt, and snot – I’ll ever come through, or if this state of gulpy, ragged breaths and overwhelming greyness will remain forever by my side.

I’ve woken up and begged for it all to be a dream.

These dopamine-drained moments would not make it into my obituary. Similar days, months, years do not make it into any of the obituaries I have read. Instead, these moments can be found in the gaps, in the spaces… in the short, sharp sentences.

The marriage ended. Their partner died. They lost their job.

What’s unsaid lingers, we can almost feel it, grasp at it, particularly if we’ve been there ourselves.

Knowing this, what doesn’t make the cut in the summary of a life, brings me an odd comfort. For I know that deep, dark dips exist within all of us. That those dips can last for years. Yet I also know that while these experiences may muddy us, add a layer, they also don’t stop the laughter, eventually, bubbling up within us. They don’t stop us from being so loved, even when we feel coated in our own shame.

As, that’s the other thing, the intensity of sadness or anger or cruelty we may have experienced doesn’t make the cut of the summary of our lives, but then, neither would the silliness, the laughter… the chats where you feel as if your soul is connected. It’s all condensed.

I’ve choked with laughter, over crumpled sandwich wrappers on a work desk. I’ve sat cramped in the centre-seat of a long-haul flight, and felt my happiness click into place. I’ve danced with my arms loose, my hair wild. I’ve heard my family laugh, after a time I thought we’d never laugh again.

Joy waits round so many dark corners. Our darkness does not define us.

I felt a bit silly, taking all of this, from the 500-word obituaries I read each week. Searching for the comfort within the gaps. After all, I don’t know what that persons’ overall happiness was, how they felt in their body day to day. I actually didn’t even plan on adding it to my questions to Mary McGreevy, who, for her TikTok account @tipsfromdeadpeople reads obituaries every single day (you can read part one of our chat here). But then she mentioned it! That so often when someone faces a perceived ‘failure’ in their life, there’s something waiting.

I think that this isn’t just a comfort in terms of the classic ‘this too shall pass’ but also in determining how we define our failures. As so many of the things we’re told are ‘failures’ (divorce, job losses) are not, it’s OK if a relationship or a choice doesn’t last a lifespan: that doesn’t mean you didn’t learn or grow from it, just simply that it brought you happiness… and now it doesn’t, and it’s time to move on.

Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash

So, before I get to our chat, here are some of the more recent ‘other lives’ I’ve cut out and pinned onto my board, that demonstrate what we can survive, and flourish from.

Joyce Edwards lived in a “ramshackle Hampstead home” where a flow of actors and artists lodged, with reasonable rents, so that they could concentrate on their careers. She took beautiful portraits of her guests, and printed them in the makeshift darkroom beside her bedroom. In the last few months of her life, a film-maker friend of hers went through the boxes of prints, contact sheets and negative files and is now collating an exhibition, and documentary, based on her solo work.

I love that she had a passion that so clearly fulfilled her, but also what (reading between the lines) it was born from, as, it was in 1957 Joyce took up photography, after separating from her partner.

For Jon French it was the life changing car accident he was involved, in 1989, that stripped him of one thing he loved and led him to the next. He had once worked as a structural engineer, and was “keen to get back to activity” so, two years after his accident, he launched a dance group called Candoco (which has now become a world-leading professional inclusive company) and went on to tour the world, expanding perceptions of what dance could be. After leaving Candoco, he then joined Face Front, a disability focused theatre group, that has gone on (with Jon playing a pivotal role) to “transform thousands of lives”

As someone who has watched the media industry I entered (and dreamed of working in) change in a startling, scary (sometimes exciting) manner I so understand Nick Kelly’s story. I can feel his loneliness in one section of his obituary that explains that, in his career as a journalist, he moved on from a newspaper taking his writing to online publications. But he missed “the people and the solidarity he [had] so enjoyed while at the newspaper.” After that, however, a move to Barcelona re-inspired him and he “spent happy days photographing [the] city, getting quiet joy – as he always did – from observing the small things, the morning sunlight dappling a building, how a tree might bend in the wind.”

Finally, there’s Penelope Rogers, who struggled deeply with agoraphobia. Her friend, Alan, who wrote her obituary notes that in the 48 years he’d known her he didn’t think she had “strayed more than a few hundred yards from her basement flat in York.” And that, despite a life that “to casual acquaintances” may have seemed “unbearably constrained” she managed her condition with “great practicality.”

He writes: “she was a loyal friend whose company I shared in her secluded garden, at pub quizzes and, on some wonderful nights out at a blues club two streets from her home.” It seems, despite everything she had gone through, including the early death of her partner, Ian, she found joy and positivity within her constraints. “Over a cup of super strength coffee, she and I once agreed that you could only evaluate a person’s achievements by knowing where they came from. By that measure her life was monumentally heroic.”

Those last lines are how Penelope’s write-up ends and, as you’ll read below, in part two of my chat with Mary, there’s so much about us all that’s monumentally heroic. Things that don’t come from our careers, or achievements (more on that last week) but instead the tiny things that bring us, and those around us joy. We discuss how we are all capable of horrendous, yet wonderful things, and that there will be, despite it all, people who loves us.

The interview

What other things have you learned about yourself from reading obituaries?

I’m very politically liberal, so I expected that the obituaries that I would feature would all be [people and views] that I would approve of in my own life. But that’s not been the case.

I recently told a story about a man who was a gun-toting, far-right supporter, probably someone I might be quite scared to know in real life but he was so well loved.

My followers are also so mixed in their backgrounds and beliefs: there’s Christian mommy bloggers, Trump people, Wiccan herbalists… yet their politics don’t show up in the comments. There’s not many places in life where, online, people can agree, but this appears to be a place where, at the end of life, people give each other a pass. I did one recently of a woman who was like a total renegade, she was polyamorous and real left of centre and I got 2000 comments, from all sides, of people just being like “rock on!”

I think it’s so important for us to consider what value we place on different lives, and examine that, as well as the fact that no one is perfect. I do some volunteering work with the homeless community and I went to a service (mentioned in the bottom of this post) that was for all the homeless people that had died that year. There were dedications read out, and it was a special service as many were acknowledging that these were difficult people who had led very difficult lives. They weren't loved by everyone, but they were deeply loved by some. It’s possible for us to be able to say: I don't agree with a lot of their actions, but they were loved and they had a life.

I am drawn towards obituaries that are not airbrushed or templated. I featured one last year, and her kid wrote the obituary and it said: she lived a life that no one would want, and she alienated a lot of people, but she lived it like a Queen. Or there was another, written by a son, that read: she wanted to but she couldn’t find how to parent us right, but she taught us how to read and she was the life of the party… but she didn’t parent us well. We just loved her despite and because of it all.

One of the my newsletter interviews was with Sarah Tarlow, who wrote a memoir about her husband’s death and the grief that followed, and one of the things she really wanted to acknowledge was that, at times, her marriage wasn't very happy and, at times, her husband wasn't the greatest of guys. She said she didn’t like how we paint people as angels when they die when we are all this messy mix of things. What would you most like to see acknowledged in these pieces?

I read obituaries all the time, so I come across the whole ‘would give you the shirt off his back, he had a heart of gold’ sort of cliches. I know the impulse is to make that person into an angel but instead I’ve found even as something simple as including their likes and dislikes works.

I read an obituary the other day of a teenager and his mom said: here's the TV shows that Aaron loved and it was like a whole paragraph of animated television shows. There wasn't much else in the obituary but it was enough to understand what was important to him.

Some classic writing advice is ‘show don’t tell’ and I guess it applies here too, so don’t tell us they were a good person, show us with a story.

I also believe that these stories can help us get more comfortable with our own deaths, can you explain a little more why you think that?

Obviously death is very scary but I feel confident that, at least for me, it would help knowing that the fact I mattered on this earth was reflected [after I was gone.] I get a lot of comments from people hoping their children know how they’d like to be represented, or I get people saying ‘oh I need to write my grandma's obituary again, because we didn't say anything real about her.’

It could also be an avenue into more vital, but underdiscussed conversations, as you could begin to discuss funny stories someone might want in their obituary, and that could lead onto a discussion about how someone would want their end-of-life care to look…

That’s very true. We don’t have to wait to have these conversations.

What have been some of the stand-out obituaries that you’ve read?

I have a special place in my heart for obituaries about difficult moms. Because there is a tendency to put the angel treatment on moms more than anybody else. So when someone has a complicated relationship with their mom, and they tell that in a way that feels nuanced and comprehensive, they stand out. Or ones written about difficult people.

There was an obituary that I saw early about a woman that was a total character. It was a long obituary, and her kids went into great detail about how much she loved Diet Coke. She had conducted a decade's long taste test, scientifically listing every time coke came out with a new product, how that ranked compared to the others. There was also an obituary of a mom about her son who died in a drunk driving accident and he was the drunk driver. The first paragraph read: my son Cody was a dumbass. Don't be a dumbass. It was a very loving obituary. She sent it to me as she she wanted to save other people from doing that.

Another recent one was about a homeless man, and how he stubbornly chose over the course of 50 years to live on the streets. And despite his family and the nonprofit community's best efforts at getting him housing, he just wouldn't. He was voted Most Likely to Succeed in his high school, and then schizophrenia kicks in and he goes to the on the streets for 50 years. And then this professional obituary writer wrote a beautiful story about him.

What about the life lessons you’ve learned?

I said this earlier, but I repeat it all the time: your life is more than your job. It's not bad to find a job that you love and to do well at it. But it doesn't say anything about the overall happiness of your life.

I also see obituaries all the time of people who have had like a “failure” in their life, like a divorce or addiction or getting fired or being in prison. And 99% of the time something else, better, follows. So, if you think your life is defined by a failure, or something that was your lowest point, there’s something else coming.

That is exactly one of the reasons why I like to read the obituaries is because I like to think of, like you said earlier, the things that are unsaid. I’ll read a divorce, or a great loss, and I’ll see those things and know that the person will have been through great anguish during that time of their life. But when you look at it over the span of life, it's just a small thing.

I'm not saying ‘it's a small thing’ to downplay other people’s sadness but more that it helps me think of my own life, and crises, and it's okay we're all going to have times when we're trip up but overall we are living a life that’s full, and fulfilling.

I find it refreshing when people talk about addiction and mental illness in obituaries as just the normal course of things. It’s definitely more common in younger generations, so I wonder if that will become more common.  Maybe obituaries are going to go the way of the dodo bird but I hope not. If they do stick around, I would love it if that kind of truth telling as part of it.

And that’s the end of my chat with Mary, do give her a follow if you’re on TikTok she’s here and let me know what you thought, has this sparked anything for you? As to how you’d like your life to be told? Let me know in the comments.

Also, I’m always looking out for people to interview so if you know anyone (or you’d like to chat) please do get in touch!