Obscure obituaries

 

In my opinion it is always worthwhile to read the obituaries of those you have never heard of or those of less "significant" people. The reason is simple. You will always learn something you did not know. They are dead now, their achievements are pretty much over and done, other than a dwindling influence of some sort. They are shadows and will disappear, quickly or slowly depending on the life they lived, but they lived and whatever they did may be understood from those short obituary paragraphs that explain something of their life and the influence they had. All our fates are merged in the obituary, those who read the words, those now gone and whom the words might try to describe. We all walk the same line; narrow, trivial, brilliant, meaningless or meaningful. In the end there are only descriptions, directions and the names of the survivors. History is forever complicated and incomplete.