Topic 14: A Model Obituary

Carol:

A Model Life

A well-written obituary is much like any other kind of writing. It uses concrete detail, avoids platitudes, provides accurate facts and reflects the nature of the subject. I want to add “tries to be interesting and entertaining” although people may disagree. I often read the New York Times obituaries just because they are so well-written; they do entertain me. Most of the obituaries in my local newspaper fall into two categories: the free “just the facts” basic information about the deceased and funeral plans provided by the mortuary and the paid obituaries written by friends or family members that include the more intimate details of the loved one’s life, capturing if possible a little of what made the deceased a unique person. I have read numerous family obituaries to fill in the genealogical gaps for my family history project. Sometimes I get real surprises.

M. Virginia Fike Rosenbaum (1921-2005) was my
mother’s first cousin, the daughter of Grandpa Fike’s brother John. I have a single, small photo of Virginia dated 1952, and she looks like a typical housewife, perhaps a neighbor of the Cleaver family on Leave it to Beaver. However, her obituary shows a woman who was anything but typical. At the time of the photograph, she had already risen to Account Executive for the Henry J. Kaufman Advertising Agency in Washington, D.C., started her own agency, then purchased the Allegany Citizen which she edited and published for almost 30 years. She later owned a surveying company and was the first woman county surveyor in Maryland. These are but a few of the business credentials detailed in her obituary. She was also a social activist and devout Catholic, who “purchased a school house and held classes for Catholic children in rural Maryland and Pennsylvania” (source: May 13, 2003 The Republican online edition). Her accomplishments are too numerous to fit into a single page, making her the ideal subject for a “model obituary.”



The same year the photo of M. Virginia Fike Rosenbaum was taken, Grandpa Fike’s Aunt Annie Grassmyer died (1868-1952), Her obituary is barely a paragraph, mostly giving the family lineage of the “already deads” and “left behinds, “ including mention of a favorite nephew Herbert Grassmyer with whom she had lived for years. Aunt Annie never married, instead was caregiver and housekeeper for her elderly mother and a male relative until both died within weeks of each other in 1911. I have a single, small photo of Annie by herself but lots of family pictures with all the Fike and Grassmyer siblings and their children. Sometimes I need a magnifying glass to pick her out, one of several plainish older women in long skirts and aprons. Yet, she stands out in her own way. She is the one who is always smiling. Her accomplishments? Less tangible than Virginia’s, harder to capture in words: devotion to mother, delight in young children, deep roots in her Pennsylvania Dutch community, faithful church-goer who taught Sunday and donated her “spinster’s mite” to the Methodist missions.

A model obituary? No. A model life, a happy life? Yes, yes.





Megan:

"Died tragically rescuing his family from the wreckage of a destroyed sinking battleship."
– Royal Tenenbaum’s headstone.

One day short of her 100th birthday, Ms Hammond passed away in her sleep. Ms. Hammond spent most of her 20’s in England, where she attended library school and then worked as the library manager for a maximum-security prison. She returned to the United States in the midst of the Great Recession, and lived with her parents. Shortly before her 30th birthday Ms. Hammond received an unexpected and anonymous inheritance, which left her financially secure for the rest of her life.

From that point on, she focused on writing and traveling the world. She divided her time between the US and the UK. Over the next 60 years, Ms Hammond published more than 30 works of fiction, but is more famously known for her literary travel guides, which remain on the best-seller list to this day. Ms Hammond was among the first civilians to travel to the moon, and her subsequent novel, “A View of Earth from the Moon” was credited with popularizing Lunar Travel in the mid-2040’s. Ms Hammond was a prolific diarist and her journals, which numbered in the hundreds, have been preserved in a special collection and donated to Mills College, where Ms Hammond received both her BA (2004). and her MFA (2024).

A life-long advocate of libraries and information literacy, Ms Hammond was instrumental in securing an endowment to ensure that public school libraries were staffed by qualified, professional librarians.

She is survived by her partner of nearly 70 years, children and grandchildren.