Does your grandma read obituaries?

Does your grandma read the obituaries? Mine does. Don’t you think that’s creepy?

It’s not like Gram’s planning to die or anything– she’s not even that old. Well, she is old, she’s sixty– but in lots of ways she seems younger than my mother. Probably because she doesn’t have as much to worry about as Mom does. She’s past a lot of it.

I tell Gram it’s creepy to read obituaries, but she says it’s no more creepy than going to church. It makes her think about what really matters, she says. I say obituaries aren’t just creepy, they’re dull. Mostly lists of jobs and titles and awards and survivors, and who cares? What’s the point? That’s the point, she says. All the things that seem important to people in the rat race seem pretty boring when printed out in the paper. A janitor gets a paragraph if he’s lucky, a CEO gets a quarter of a page. Most women get nothing at all: 4 out of 5 obituaries are of men– it’s like women don’t die. Maybe they don’t, Grandma says. Maybe because they don’t leave much of a paper trail in the world, they live quietly on in the hearts of those they leave behind.