a remark was passed

I recently overheard someone off-handedly mentioning my penchant for reading the obituaries every morning, obsessively scanning the pages for a friend, colleague, past dalliance, or perhaps my own self. Then it dawned on me that I am searching for something that defies being uncovered. All of those pages of vacant smiles taunting me from beyond, with knowing looks of journeys ended, or maybe even begun. I found myself recently beginning to feed my habit by reading the profiles on mydeathspace.com to see how it all ends for those of us here exposing our souls 14 kilobytes at a time in comments and messages that will long outlive our bodies.

My mother used to go through shoeboxes full of old photos, and highlight the relatives that I would never meet; people who are holding me as a baby, or drinking a cocktail (or both!), or posing in front of an irreplaceable landmark long since gone. Funny, how one of my first memories of death was when my grandmother would point to a black-and-white photo of my grandfather under her glass-topped dresser and tell me how he died 8 years before I was born and was now "six feet under." In the picture, he is seated at his desk, smiling and holding a pen in what can best be described as a posed candid. For years, I assumed that everyone who died, went off to go work in underground offices without windows, never to return.

Of course, nowadays these shoeboxes of memories reside on hard drives and servers in Burbank, CA. But they do serve the same purpose of a collective memory source nonetheless.These photos (which I am so definitely not fond of participating in) are the testament to a life lived. To holidays with friends, and tortured family vacations. To lovers departed, and documentation of delight and despair.

No matter what else is happening in our lives aside from the one nanosecond that the camera lens captures, we are able to muster a smile, and see into the future for a fleeting moment.

I am obliged to take pause, and stare back.