People come in into our lives: uninvited, unwelcomed, unknowingly. When they are taken away, due to nature’s steady course or life’s cruel unpredictability, we speak of their wanted presence in our own transience. We lament their absence, their voice, their laughter. We grieve.
It is all normal, we are told. More so, it is all expected. We have been socially ushered into understanding the necessity behind this division of labor. No matter how many times we go through the motions, we are surprised by each new departure: a new sting, unpremeditated, unforeseen, populates our senses. We lean on what we have been taught: we think of life, we think of the time we shared with the dearly departed.
Most Western societies are accustomed to ‘life-affirming practices’ since, indeed, they have long accepted and practiced the art of ‘the obituary’. Obits, for short, are by definition life-affirming: as most Obits writers will tell you, the first rule is – life, how it was lived, not cause of death. Namely, they attempt to recast a person’s biography in not more than 500 words (again, the word count does depend on the social relevance of the deceased). Social significance aside, most civil servants, even those lowly positioned on the social ladder, receive an Obits’ notification in the newspapers.
In Macedonia, Obits are a rare practice. If indeed we chance upon one in the local papers, it is in fact an oddity: what is celebrated, the life that is remembered, does not belong to ‘a person’, it most definitely focuses on ‘the person’: an exceptional journalist, or philanthropist. Or fallen hero, of a time forlorn.
Instead, we are more comfortable with another form of ‘remembrance’: the necrologue. Though most dictionaries, online or otherwise, would position these two practices as synonymous, there is an exact distinction: while the obituary celebrates the life of the life that has been lost, the necrologue announces the way in which other lives will, from now on, position themselves towards this loss. In a sense, the necrologue is less about the departed and more about the living: how family, friends, acquaintances, from now on, are to measure time, in reference to their loss.
Knowing all this, I was not prepared for yet another intervention by society on our already increasingly conditioned lifestyles.
In August 2007, we heard news that a beloved uncle had been taken from us too prematurely. Just as we were about to celebrate his new diplomatic position, the hard-hitting facts came biting in. As the family was gathering from all corners of the known world, and preparing for yet another fissure in our already broken perspective on things – cremation – I was to place the necrologue in the local papers. My grandfather should not bear the heat, my parents and I decided. So, it was up to me to place our own strand of the family’s commemorative token.
I must say that, even though, I had passed by the ‘announcements’ building that carries the ‘necrologue’ space for the three major Macedonian daily publications, this was my first time, entering on my own, with a specific task at hand. (Since then, I had had the unfortunate luck to enter this building twice more, each time less prepared than before).
After finding the floor, pressing the elevator button, getting to the offices, writing out the exact wording, it came time to settle the bill. Yes, payment is a reality, perhaps greater than the certainty of life and death altogether. I forked out the sum, and as I was about to leave, the lady behind the counter presented me with the receipt (yes, the fiscally correct bill). Just as I was about to stash this paper, with the rest of its kind, in my otherwise empty wallet, I noticed something that will perhaps haunt me until my dying days. My uncle’s name was printed on the receipt: he was ‘the purchased item’.
I barely found my legs to take me to the elevator. The rest few minutes are still a haze. As I left the building, and found shelter under a near-by tree, I looked at the receipt again.
No class or reading I had taken at undergraduate, graduate or post-graduate level had prepared me for this. No Adorno, or Horkheimer, or Arendt, or Marcuse, or for that matter, hooks, Omi, Winant, Said, Gilroy, Gramsci, Spivak.
By placing a commemorative token, I had unwittingly participated in the creation of a grotesque ritualization: I had purchased my uncle. I now, in my wallet, have a crazy ‘bill of sale’, and yet they keep telling me it is 2009, we live in an enlightened age.
I am certain that people who keep our monetary practices at bay would not have such a violent reaction: theirs is a world of numbers and stats, which always round off, and give meaning to each other.
But the world of flesh is not one that can be so easily forgiving: by placing a ‘necrologue’, today, in the Republic of Macedonia, we become, quite knowingly, perpetuators of something so drastically removed from the act of remembrance. We become consumers, of the same flesh we tend to lament and hope to remember.
Thus, until something can be done, and I’d like to think it can (call me the proverbial social romantic, I still believe in the old adage – ‘where there is a will, there is a way’), I suggest that we do embrace the Obits practice: that we concentrate on the texture and significance of the life lost, and not on the moment we can finally say farewell. And for this we do not need papers, we do not need mediators. We just need to remember: how we meet, what we did, why we laughed.
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