Obituary

by Daniel Pié

Susan’s question lingers in her unmistakable, raspy alto as I approach the portico entrance to the mortuary. My legs quake under the weight of unsaddled emotion. My hollowed-out stomach creaks, needing to be fed but allowing nothing to enter except for the occasional piece of dry toast. I slip a thumb behind my waistband and think I detect a gap that wasn’t there a week ago.

A woman I calculate to be about 70, wearing a handsome charcoal pantsuit, greets me. Mrs. Marsden’s wide two-inch heels tap a 2/4 measure on a neutral beige tile as we walk to her office, which reminds me of my late grandmother’s living room. A garden of flowered upholstery envelopes me. A fireplace mantel stages a parade of smiling Marsden generations. The mantel, like the ornate crown molding, is a dark stain, as is Mrs. Marsden’s antique dual-sided desk. With practiced patience she allows me to take it all in, smiling the same smile as her framed descendants.

“Mr. Marsden and I founded our business in 1978,” she informs me, raising her drawn-on eyebrows as if the date might pop up on a quiz. “Details,” she muses. “We don’t pay them much attention as they happen, but they become the stories of our lives.” She gives me a few moments to absorb the wisdom. “So, Mr. Radcliffe, let me express our deepest condolences on your loss. Mr. Marsden and I want to thank you for choosing—”

“Oh. No. I’m Mr. Simmons, Kirk Simmons. Sorry for the confusion.”

Mrs. Marsden’s smile puckers. “You’re not the widower? Mr. Radcliffe?”

“There is no Mr. Radcliffe. That was Susan’s maiden name. She took it back after our divorce.”

“I’m afraid I’m a little confused by your presence then, Mr. Simmons. We don’t normally offer our services to persons outside of the immediate family. When you set up this appointment, I assumed, well, it followed, in my mind, that you were the husband of the late Mrs.—Ms. Radcliffe.”

We are joined by the natty Mr. Marsden. Entering the office, he extends a hand while still a good ten feet away, allowing a jeweled cufflink to peek out from under his coat sleeve. His pencil mustache is the same shade of gray as the pinstripes on his dark suit. I imagine his closet with twenty or more identical suits on cushioned hangers, each precisely three-quarters of an inch apart. His arrival, coming at the height of Mrs. Marsden’s confusion, causes me to wonder if her desk isn’t wired like a bank teller’s—a hand slipping inconspicuously beneath the center drawer and depressing an alarm button.

Someone from the law office where Susan had been a secretary for many years made the initial inquiry regarding funeral arrangements. They would be in touch again soon, I assure the Marsdens, and will cover the expenses.

Susan was an only child. Her father, who apparently passed along a heart condition known as Sudden Cardiac Death, fell victim in his mid-fifties, about a dozen years ago. If Susan was concerned about her own vulnerability, she didn’t express it. “I prefer to spend my time living rather than worrying about how I might die,” she said.

Her father had a brother, from whom he was estranged, living somewhere in the Southeast. Her mother, also an only child, orphaned Susan five years ago after a brief bout with lung cancer. I was contacted by the law firm and asked if I would consider putting something together for her obituary.

“Me being, in a sense, her only survivor, they want me to write it,” I tell the Marsdens. “I write advertising copy for a living. I know it’s not exactly the same kind of writing, but . . .”

Their foreheads crinkle in concern at my request, but they agree, with one proviso. They will have to sign off on the finished product. “We have a reputation to protect,” Mr. Marsden says.

“You understand. The ex-factor.” He underscores the remark with a mischievous smile. “As in ex-husband. You might be angling for a last shot.” He says his operation has a fine reputation with the Eagle-Messenger, the daily newspaper whose masthead once boasted a 120,000-copy circulation. It has since diminished to under 40,000 in the throes of print’s ongoing demise. Keeping up that reputation, it would only accept obituaries submitted by licensed morticians. Mrs. Marsden, picking up on her husband’s no-nonsense demeanor, strongly advises keeping the obituary under 500 words, saying with caution in her voice, “Or the cost goes up.”

My thoughts are fitful during the drive home, hopping from what dinner conversations must be like for married morticians, to my need for nourishment despite bouts of nausea, to what I might write that would meet the approval of Susan and, now, the Marsdens. Who are we anyway? Are we what we think ourselves to be, or are we defined by what others think of us?

This paradox brings to mind the time Susan got into a heated political discussion—a row, really—with a man on the periphery of our social circle. Their “debate” became so loud that the other dinner guests grew quiet before the host angled her body in between Susan and the man and deftly changed the subject. The low buzz of merriment gradually resumed, but as we left that evening the air was still tense.

Later, as I was about to knock on the bathroom door to say good night, I heard Susan sniffling. “Everything okay?” I asked.

“Why did I say those things?” she answered through the door. “I know better.”

We dated for two years, were married for almost nine, and talked on the phone at least three nights a week in the two and a half years after our divorce. It was always me who called her, and though she signaled the end of most of those conversations, lamenting the lateness of the hour or an early appointment the next day, she always accepted my calls.

“Who are you?” Susan asked everyone.

Agape and green as spring grass, her eyes held your attention in a vise. The whites opened to the size of eggs until she got an answer. When directed at me, the question was often asked in exasperation. Another of my inexplicable notions or deeds caused her to grasp her ginger hair in disbelief. “Who ARE you?”

When Susan wanted to know you, a longtime acquaintance quipped, it was like being deposed by a priest with a degree in psychology and a part-time job with the FBI. She was irrepressible, but she was equally dogged in pursuing knowledge about herself. If anything, that self-reflection grew toward the end.

I had been calling her frequently, more than usual, in those final weeks. Not out of prescience. No one was more surprised or devastated by her death. I was nearly catatonic at first, but now my shock has given way to the gray solitude of grief.

The obituary form Mrs. Marsden provided isn’t going to be much help. Perusing it, I blindly reach for my flip-top box of Marlboros, bumping the ashtray and scattering several butts and a mound of ashes onto the desk. “Why you started smoking at this point in your life, I’ll never figure out,” Susan scolded during one of our phone sessions. That was, what, two, three months ago? I sigh, running splayed fingers through my unkempt oily brown hair to tamp the escalating impact of her absence.

“Names of children” jumps off the form. The designated blank space is a river too daunting to cross. I reach for the lip-smudged glass, an unfinished finger of Four Roses patiently awaiting my return in a copse of water marks. I’d moved the mahogany desk to the bedroom after Susan left. She insisted on keeping each room’s purpose sacrosanct. The bedroom was off-limits for my desk, just as our bed would have been unwelcome in the den. The drinking is an addition I hadn’t mentioned but assume she had suspected.

I struggle momentarily to calculate how old he would have been.

She is survived by her husband, Kirk, and a son, Rory, 8.

The boy’s name, which I didn’t consult Susan on and never told her about, was my invention after I finally learned about the pregnancy and miscarriage. You used to be her husband, Kirk, and there never was a Rory.

As I delete what I’ve written, Caine fidgets on the faux Persian throw near my feet. He glances up and grunts before his eyelids shutter. I see no reason to banish the beast back to his blanket on the mudroom floor since I’ve already violated Susan’s rules with the desk.

I christened the rumbling hound Caine before I got him home. I’d given a moment’s thought to Winston but reasoned it’s best for a dog’s name to be one syllable. Easier to convey commands. Even so, to this day, nine years and some odd months on now, I’ve always addressed him as My’el. To my ear, the cockney accent is spot on. To Susan, the impersonation was beyond annoying. “It was funny at the beginning, Kirk.” I would learn in our phone conversations that she had to work at not letting something so trivial send her mood into a tailspin.

Buying the dog was pure impulse. We hadn’t even discussed getting a pet. Her anger at not being consulted was apparent, though she tried to mask it by acting indifferent toward the dog.

Turns out, she was a dog lover. She had several growing up. One, a slobbering Saint Bernard, she cried over for months when it had to be put down. I learned this after our divorce, as well, when I started listening.

She told me it was all she could do to disguise her excitement when she called during the drive home from the gynecologist’s to make sure I was there. She made up a story that she’d gone out to pick up a few things for dinner. “I have a surprise.”

“Sounds yummy. I’ve got a surprise, too.”

I misread Susan’s blushed cheeks and beaming smile as she came through the door.

“Surprise!” I shouted, as the furry little cannonball bounced around her legs.

The joy on her face gave way to confusion as she half-stooped to either pet or fend off the animal.

“Watch this,” I said, dispensing with our usual kiss.

“My’el!” I said, “Wha brins you ere?” Caine abandoned Susan and ran back to me. “His name is Caine. Get it?”

“Who’s its owner?”

“I named him Caine. I hope you don’t mind. Just seems like a natural for a British bulldog.”

“You decided to get Caine, when exactly?”

“Just today. Isn’t that crazy? I saw the ad in the newspaper, and the next thing I know, I’m on the phone with the breeder.”

“Kirk, don’t you think a decision like that should . . .”

“What’s your surprise?”

“Sorry?”

“Your surprise. You said on the phone you had a surprise.”

“Oh.” In hindsight, I can see her mind erasing something. “There’s talk of holiday bonuses. Nothing official yet.”

“Your firm is really generous that way. I’m sure it will happen.”

On the day she came by to pick up the last of her things, the finality of our demise registered. I assumed there’d be a reconciliation. We agreed a trial separation would be stupid and an oxymoron. As I watched her drive off, I fought the urge to run out into the street and beg her to come back. Instead, I retreated inside, which brought Caine bounding from his blanket. He waited for my familiar refrain that, for the first time, I withheld.

Susan said I withheld things. “Every time I think I know you you do or say something that makes me think I barely know you at all.” It made her feel less a part of a partnership, she said. I thought I saw her disillusionment in Caine’s eyes as I pressed the door back into the latch with the small of my back.

Put down. In my mind, I swirl the expression like you taste the first pour of a new wine. The flavorless words hit the palate cold and raw, yet they are often undeniably accurate.

Susan Radcliffe, age . . . of Stanton, was put down on Oct. 10 following a brief illness.

She likely died as EMTs worked ceaselessly on her en route to the hospital, where further defibrillation failed to resuscitate her.

“Why is it a beautiful act of mercy to put down our suffering pets, but offensive, even an insult to God, if our loved ones are suffering?” Susan once demanded rhetorically.

“We sort of do that,” I responded. “Give them a cocktail of opiates and sedatives to blunt the pain and induce sleep until the end.”

“It’s not the same,” she snapped. “I’m talking about ending a life humanely, not applying a salve until the infection kills you.”

As I reflect on that memory, I look down at Caine. “His days are numbered,” the veterinarian told me at the last visit. “Let’s hope it’s a high number.” He assured me the end game is very humane—not for humans, apparently—but suggested we delay the conversation until the time drew nearer. “Enjoy the old boy while you still have him,” he said. 

“Don’t worry. When your time comes, My’el, you’ll be put down,” I say, rising to pace the bedroom floor.

Near the end of one of our phone calls, Susan paused, then abruptly veered from what we had been talking about. “I saw where old Mrs. McGinty died. She must have worked at the bakery for fifty years. I remember her giving me a free doughnut when I went there with my mother. I was something like six or seven.”

“It was her time, I guess,” I offered weakly.

“Yeah, well, when I die, I die. The law firm has access to my instructions. I’ll mail you a copy. None of that ‘passed away’ nonsense.”

“You expecting to exit soon?”

“No, but when I do, I don’t want it sugar-coated.”

Mrs. McGinty would have appreciated Susan’s unintended pun.

I flatten the kinks and wrinkles out of the newspaper to peruse the obituaries for helpful hints. The faces looking back at me don’t wear the countenance of the dead—an embalmed, expressionless eternal sleep. Mostly, they are smiling, indeed they are overjoyed. As I skim the summations of their lives, I understand why. They have sidestepped mortality through the magic of prose. Maybe only two in ten are declared dead.

The others are beneficiaries of euphemism, and of those, most have a religious twist. One of the obituaries this day is for a 53-year-old truck driver who was “called to heaven.” Did he get the call just after he fell asleep and plunged his rig down the 200-foot embankment?

Susan was upset when she read her mother’s obituary. The mortician who wrote it opined that the poor woman, whose suffering was short-lived but intense, had “gone to be with the Lord.”

Another high percentage of obituaries are an homage to military service. Men, particularly, or those they have left behind, want their time and sacrifice defending the country to be their lasting imprint. Today alone, a middle-age Army veteran of the Gulf War and a nonagenarian Navy veteran of World War II are pictured in full dress uniform. Both were much older, one considerably so, than when they served, but are beaming youths in their photos.

I’m most drawn to the obituaries with two photos, showing the deceased at different ages. It helps me to imagine an arc to their lives, to get a sense of their journeys. They had a life and weren’t always this old man or that old woman. Of course, the price of the obituary goes up with each additional photo. Much in death is the same as in life.

Where is that picture of Susan in Mont Royal? It was our first real vacation, several years into our marriage. Rory may have been created on that trip. We were like teenagers loosed from parental authority for the first time. She kept running ahead of me in the park, looking over her shoulder and teasing me to keep up. At one of those moments I took the photo. The setting sun’s last burst caught the side of her face. Her expression was part innocence, part vixen, and captured the mystery of her I never fully unlocked. I wonder if Susan took it with her when she left? She mentioned it once on the phone. “Seems even at our closest I was always running from you.”

Many of these obituaries ignore the cause of death or tread lightly on it, leaving only a hint at the very end:

In lieu of flowers, send donations to the American Cancer Society.

I’m angry now, seized by the unfairness of Susan’s death. She was erased before she could live out a full life. Then I come upon the obituary for the infant daughter of a young couple.

Susan at least had a story, however incomplete. The little girl was alive barely long enough to even begin a story. Who are you, little one? Susan would have asked.

The end of a marriage or long relationship is its own kind of death. Unlike physical deaths, though, some relationships do pass away.

Susan’s miscarriage, like 80 percent of them, happened in the first trimester, before physical changes became noticeable to my inattentive eye. She could have kept it a secret for eternity.

She positioned herself on the loveseat, angling toward me as she awaited my full attention. Her expression was resolute even as her eyes filled to the breaking point like a nimbus cloud. When she began speaking, it was in a trembling but determined voice.

I didn’t know how to react, learning of the miscarriage and the pregnancy at the same moment. Those two weighted words came off her lips like submarine torpedoes. In the split second I tried to calculate a maneuver to avoid impact, they struck with devastating force.

Breathe, my subconscious pleaded, and I waited to feel a reassuring heartbeat. Susan placed a hand on top of mine. “Kirk?” The gesture brought me back, but I immediately lifted my hands free and pressed them to my temples.

The empathy was there, but it was anger that scaled the walls of my heart. I desperately fought it, but eventually, anger overwhelmed me. I stood, as if doing so might modify my agitation. She may even have forgiven me for the harsh words that came out, but I wouldn’t let go. Later, calmer, I tried to reconstruct what had happened. “I could have done something to save the baby, if I’d only known.”

“No, you couldn’t have,” Susan said.

“I could have helped you take better care of yourself, prepared healthier meals, made certain you got more rest.”

She didn’t say anything else. Instead, her eyes penetrated me, mining for insights as they always did.

Ironically, it may well have been in the silence that I began to hear myself. My words had passed judgment. Susan felt my condemnation, real or unintended, acutely. The prickly months that followed were the only time when talking to each other became difficult or painful.

The Marsdens take several days to respond. I am nervous about their reaction but believe I have written the obituary as Susan would have wanted.

“It is quite unusual,” Mrs. Marsden blurts right after I answer her call. “That is, when compared to a typical obituary. Mr. Marsden and I were wondering how open you are to smoothing some of the rough edges.”

“Mrs. Marsden, I think Susan would be okay with . . .”

“But then we thought about it a little more,” she goes on, “and decided it was honest and respectful—though a little crudely stated in parts—so, we’re not going to insist on any changes.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Marsden, you won’t regret . . .”

“Oh, and one other thing: It did run over the 500-word limit a bit, but we’re going to waive the extra cost.”

The obituary appears in the Eagle-Messenger, both online and in print. Along with it are two photos Mrs. Marsden said were supplied by Susan’s employer. In one, cropped from a group shot taken at an office holiday party, Susan appears surprised and overjoyed. She must have received the rumored bonus. The other photo had been tucked away in Susan’s desk and discovered by a co-worker.

“It has a hauntingly beautiful quality to it,” the co-worker told Mrs. Marsden, who conveyed the comment to me. “Looking over her shoulder as she was, well, it was simply her. It must have been important to her at one time.”

Thursday, Oct.19

Susan Radcliffe died recently. She left instructions to inform anyone who would want to know. It might be simpler “To text both of them,” she joked.

Like most people, she had a middle name—Jane—and, like most people, didn’t share that knowledge with anyone unless they asked. She was a specific age, too, but held that it was “Nobody’s damn business.” For clarity sake, she allowed that Jane was her maternal grandmother’s name.

Susan’s end came quickly and unexpectedly (cardiac arrest).

She thought a lot about what may or may not happen after this life. She confessed in the early morning hours of one of our phone conversations that it frustrated her that despite all her thinking on the subject, it didn’t give her any special insight.

She was clear about not wanting this obituary to read that she “went to be with the Lord” or was “called to heaven” or any other religious “fantasy” (her word). Neither did she want it to say she “passed peacefully” or was “surrounded by her loving family,” or more-hokey euphemisms like she “went out yonder” or “transitioned to her forever home.” She thought it strange that 70 percent or so of the people written about on the obituary pages didn’t die. They “passed away.” “Isn’t that just like people,” she said, “unable to be honest even when the municipal coroner has the paperwork to prove Otherwise.”

More important to Susan was life. She spent hers, shortened though it was, asking the only question that matters: Who are you? She asked it of the people she cared about (nearly everyone), and she asked it of herself.

Susan was married to this obituary’s author, Kirk Simmons, for the better part of a decade. The words “better part” are the author’s. The decade was better for him than for Susan. They stayed in close contact with each other long after their divorce. She counseled, chastised, encouraged, and—he likes to think—may have even loved him in their post-marriage years. In the least, she made the time to talk to him, often long into the night, as he struggled with her fundamental question.

She had no siblings and beyond her father (Milton) and mother (Beatrice), both of whom died ahead of her, had no extended family to speak of. What she had in spades was passion and curiosity. She was smart as a whip, an expression that made her scratch her head. Praise for her hard work and attention to detail was not a platitude. Her longtime employer, the law firm of Giuliotti, Isaac and Flanagan, often doled out bonuses for her work as a legal secretary.

As to the question of who she was, I can best answer this way: She was the person in this life that I loved and admired the most, and the one I will miss the most. Susan left instructions that in lieu of flowers, donations should be made to the local British Bulldog Rescue.

V

by Janelle Cordero

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Daniel Pié, 72, is a retiree. He was a longtime copy editor at The Arizona Republic. His stories have appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Clackamas Literary Review, INK Babies Literary Magazine, El Portal Literary Journal, and Streetlight Magazine. He was the winner of The New Yorker magazine cartoon caption contest for the week of Nov. 21, 2016.

Janelle Cordero is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in Spokane, WA. Her writing has been published in dozens of literary journals, including Harpur Palate, Hobart and North Dakota Quarterly, while her paintings have been featured in venues throughout the Pacific Northwest. Janelle is the author of four books of poetry: Impossible Years (V.A. Press, 2022), Many Types of Wildflowers (V.A. Press, 2020), Woke to Birds (V.A. Press, 2019) and Two Cups of Tomatoes (P.W.P. Press, 2015). Stay connected with Janelle’s work at www.janellecordero.com and follow her on Instagram @janelle_v_cordero.