My Father passed away in May 2018 from stage 4 living Cancer. Three weeks before he passed away (and when he was at his sickest, I was hospitalized battling a cancer issue as well. My parents had already prepaid their cemetery plots and headstones years ago and a few years earlier I decided to write my parents' obituaries while they were alive. It sounds a bit morbid, but it makes total sense. While alive, I was able to ask them details about where they lived, the correct spellings of names and if they wanted anything special added. I placed those obituaries on a cloud server and had given 2 other siblings access. I never would have imagined that my preparation was exactly what was needed at the time. I was hospitalized at the time that my Father's funeral was being planned. I was able to remind one of the siblings where his already written obituary was and it was a relief to my entire family that it was already written. Attempting to write an obituary at such an emotional time can be daunting.
Our relief quickly turned into disappointment when we realized how much it cost to place an obituary in the newspaper. My Father was the first close family member that has died, where I was somewhat intimately knowledgeable about the details of his funeral preparations. When my Brother began to place my Dad's obituary in the local newspaper, he was almost stymied at the expense of it. $100.00 per line! At a minimum, most people give the date, time and location of the funeral but after people have incurred the high priced burial expenses, allotting a substantial amount of money (to most) for a newspaper obituary doesn't make the cut. I recently read that the New York Times charged $263 for the first 4 lines and an additional charge for a picture. Some Newspapers charge you one price for a colored photo and another price for black & white. There's another charge depending on the size of your photo. The cost of obituaries in Newspapers is obvious price gouging during a time of mourning and it is exploitive. Most are totally opting out of this time-honored tradition that used to hold the memory of their loved one for years to come. People are now turning toward posting on the funeral home website (which is temporary) or other internet sites that are free.
There's a hidden expense that the lack of a newspaper obituary incurs that most don't think about. The expense lies in the form of history and memories. As the family genealogist, newspaper obituary archives are goldmines for family history. As I continue to fill my family tree full of thousands of names, obituaries from the past allow me to verify the names, locations, and dates of relatives from several generations back. Sometimes the obituaries of the past have allowed me to connect to relatives I didn't even know I had. Reading older obituaries is like having a short conversation with an ancestor. For a moment, the location, the people and the stories live again to be passed down to generations to come.
In my genealogical research, it appears that newspaper obituaries start to decline in the 1980s. They have all but disappeared (in my local paper) for minorities in general. My own Father's online obituary consists of two sentences and every time I see it, it saddens me. "(insert name here) passed away on (insert date here). (insert name here) was a resident of (insert state) at the time of passing."
Two sentences.
No comments:
Post a Comment