RESOLUTION: TO LIVE UP
TO MY OWN OBITUARY

Journal of Healing – Jan. 3, 2007

By Mary Koch

            Even if I’d made New Year’s resolutions, I’d have broken them by now. I decided to indulge in a different kind of self-improvement exercise: I wrote my obituary. With any luck, I’ll be able to update it each new year.

            Writing, and then reading, your own obituary can be a wake-up call if what you see on paper isn’t what you want to be doing with this gift called life. It’s like Ebenezer Scrooge staring at his lonely tombstone.

            There are no particular rules to writing an obituary. In my years as a community journalist, we wrote obituaries as little news stories, incorporating the facts of a person’s life. They were a chronology of birth, parentage, education, marriage, work, military and community service, memberships and finally, a list of surviving relatives. The trouble with facts is, they don’t always tell the real story.

            Most newspapers now charge to publish obituaries. Families of the deceased write what they want. Consequently, obituaries tend to be less professionally crafted but a lot more interesting.

*     *     *

            I DON’T know what my survivors would write about me, but I hope to leave them with some ideas:

            Mary Louise Koch, journalist, died (date to be inserted) in (place to be inserted) of (cause to be inserted). (Most of us would prefer to die in our sleep of “natural causes,” whatever they are. I wouldn’t mind dying of a “happy but worn-out heart.”)

She was (age to be inserted). (This is getting to look like a pretty incomplete, not to mention parenthetical, obituary. The rest is more certain).

            Ms. Koch once overheard a bystander comment, as she was pushing her husband’s wheelchair, “Her life sure didn’t turn out the way she expected,” to which Ms. Koch silently responded, “Thank God for that.” The older she got, the more she appreciated the unexpected.

            She was born May 12, 1944, in Minneapolis, Minn. She was raised in a Lutheran parsonage by parents who emphasized service to others, generous stewardship of resources and the importance of vocation – or answering God’s call.

            It took a while to figure out the latter. As a college student, she considered a career in music, dabbled in a variety of pursuits, and dropped in and out of a series of universities (it was the ‘60s, after all) until finally realizing that her calling was community journalism.

*     *     *

            SHE EDITED two small newspapers in western Washington, then left community newspapers for a while to get a real-life journalism education as an Associated Press editor.

In 1979 she was ready to return to grassroots journalism. John E. Andrist, publisher of the Omak-Okanogan County Chronicle – a pretty good newspaper – needed an editor. She needed a job. So they got married.

            They loved their newspaper, loved each other, and expected to live happily ever after. Their lives changed abruptly in 1993, when he was severely disabled by a brain stem stroke and she became his primary caregiver.

She learned that losing what you think is vitally important frees you to discover what really matters. She learned that providing care for one you love is a joyful vocation.         

They sold the newspaper in 1996, and she continued with free-lance writing and editing. Both before and after her husband’s stroke, she was involved in many community organizations, the most significant of which was the no-longer-active Village Green Marching Society  because it made people smile.

            At the end of her life she had only one regret; she wished she’d spent more time making music. Not as a career – just a little more time.

© Mary Koch, Omak, Washington 2006

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