Call it the “selfie obit.”
Can’t trust the local newspaper, the funeral home or even your family to get your obituary just right? Write it yourself before you go.
Some famous people have done it (Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau regularly jokes about his in his speeches), and now the idea seems to be spreading among ordinary Americans.
Put it down to the “selfie” lifestyle of social media and to the aging baby-boomer generation’s enduring need to exert control over every facet of their lives, including the end. Or maybe it’s the triumph of the DIY movement.
The auto-obituary, as it’s sometimes called, is in the news because several recently have gone viral, touching, shocking or amusing people worldwide. Type in “self obituary” on YouTube and there are about 10,000 results.
“Obits going viral is a huge phenomenon now,” said Susan Soper, 66, a former Atlanta newspaper editor who helps people organize their final wishes, including how to write their own obituaries. Since 2009, she’s sold thousands of $20 “Obitkits” that show people how to sum up their lives in ways meaningful to them.
Many of the recent selfie obits have been written by noncelebrities. But included among them was one done by the character actor James Rebhorn, who appeared on “Homeland” among many other TV and movie roles and died of skin cancer March 21 at age 65.
Soon after, Rebhorn’s self-penned obituary, written in the third person, appeared on the website of his church, St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Jersey City, N.J. Its overall message was that he considered himself a lucky man in every way.
Without his wife and two daughters, he wrote, “his life would have been little more than a vapor.” He urged his children to mourn him only as long as necessary because “they have much good work to do, and they should get busy doing it.”
His selfie did not replace the media-written obits, but it allowed Rebhorn to control what he wanted to say about himself and to his family.
“That is a big trend,” said Soper. “Control is a big issue for the baby-boomer generation – they want to control everything about their lives, including what is said about them (after death). They want to make sure it’s right.”
Other recent selfie obits, some including videos, have attracted attention.
Walter George Bruhl Jr. of New Jersey and Delaware, who died March 9 at age 80, wrote one that was posted on a local newspaper’s website. He opened with an echo of a memorably wacky Monty Python sketch about a dead parrot: Bruhl “is a dead person, he is no more, he is bereft of life, he is deceased, he has wrung down the curtain and gone to join the choir invisible, he has expired and gone to meet his maker,” he wrote.
When Val Patterson died of throat cancer in 2012 just shy of age 60, his first-person obit in the Salt Lake Tribune included some confessions: “As it turns out, I AM the guy who stole the safe from the Motor View Drive Inn back in June 1971,” he wrote. Also, his doctorate from the University of Utah? Phony; he didn’t even graduate.
One famous selfie obit writer, he said, was the British comic Spike Milligan (“The Goon Show”), who was shocked to discover that an Australian newspaper’s prewritten obit about him (many newspapers do this for famous people) consisted of a measly 30 words.
So, in 1990, Milligan wrote his own obit, riffing madly throughout. On his service during World War II, he wrote: “North Africa, promoted in the field (they wouldn’t let me indoors). Mentioned in dispatches: nothing positive, just mentioned.” When he died in 2002, London papers reprinted his selfie obit alongside fulsome media obits.
The selfie obit is part of a bigger phenomenon: a wider cultural acceptance of talking about death. Online websites such as Legacy.com proliferate. There are “Death Cafes,” where people meet regularly to talk about passing, or the Let’s Have Dinner and Talk about Death movement, where people do the same.
“People are talking about death in ways they never did before,” Soper said.
Advising people to write their own obits while they still can is a natural progression, said Ronni Bennett, 73, a self-described “elder-blogger” (blogging about and for old people) who tells her thousands of readers on TimeGoesBy.net to make the effort.
“If you’re a blogger, write a final blog post that starts with, ‘If you’re reading this, I’m dead,’” said Bennett, who has been blogging for 10 years.
Elderly blog communities tend to be intense, she said, and if someone dies, the rest of the community may not hear about it or know about it for months or longer. Thus, the final blog post, which survivors can post for them.
Older people, she said, are not as comfortable talking about themselves, let alone posting selfies and tweeting to multitudes online. But now it’s all about branding, she said, especially among the children and grandchildren of the boomers.
“Even in death, there’s self-promotion,” she said. “So many more people are accustomed to writing and talking about themselves online. There are a zillion social-networking sites. We’re going to see more (selfie obits).”
She said her final blog post already is written.
“But that reminds me: I have to update it.”
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