Jen Laird White

Why do I now find the obituaries so much more interesting than the wedding pages?  My girlhood was devoted to the wedding pages, scanning the brides, picking out the prettiest, who had the most likely to succeed husband, best job, most fabulous parents.  I dreamed of the day that I, too, would be inThe Wedding Pages.  My best friend Connie, a very smart woman who, ironically, became a professor of Womens Studies and was all about being your own self, not a reflection of some mans fantasy, well, the day after her wedding, the first thing we did was race downstairs at the Bed and Breakfast on Cape Cod that had hosted her nups, leaving her spent groom in bed,  to tear open the Wedding Section of the NY Times and,  there she was, complete.  A Times bride.  And a few years later she realized that, in fact, she was a total reflection of her husbands fantasy and a lesbian and she left.  Taking the copy of the Times announcement with her.  My own wedding announcement can be read here.(see press at top of home page)  I liked it. I was traditional, no husband photo (my mother being somewhat old school thought the two shots were just tasteless), just me, in my dress, with my friend CC taking the photo in her back yard, the dappled trees casting nice shadows and hiding the fact that I am so hung over my face is inflated to twice it’s normal size and my hands are shaking too hard to sip iced tea.   Luckily CC was hung over too and did a fine job of covering for both of us.  And I didn’t spill the iced tea on my Vera.

 Let me tell you, these wedding people take their jobs seriously.  When the pretentious fact checker called to check facts I was annoyed that she wouldn’t let me include the much more prestigious school that I had attended but quit.  Quit Junior Year for Chrissake.  But no.  That school she could not mention, but she could mention the two year Associates Degree that I had gotten in acting school.  ACTING SCHOOL.  My god,  even I know there should not be a degree associated with it.  But my elite New England college that turned away four times as many kids as it accepted?  That was an achievement worthy of the Times.  Retaken SAT’s, tough interviews, good grades with the help of Mr. Matthews the ninety year old math tutor in whose kindly but stinky realm I spent every Wednesday of my Junior year in high school trying to master Algebra 2,  letters of reccomendation from obscure alumni that you  meet once at a gathering for someone’s sixtieth anniversary and then had to have coffee with while they patted your hand with their own liver spotted fist, fighting with parents, door slamming, declarations of dropping out, dreams of just saying “yes” to the demanding boyfriend and getting knocked up which would solve everything, maybe, and finally, being invited to join the small elite liberal college crowd.  This achievement was not small and, yet, Miss Fact Checker didn’t care.  Did she not understand that the whole deal is getting in, not staying in?  Then, to add insult to injury,  Miss Fact Checker said that she had to include the fact that my husband’s, and I quote, “previous marriage had ended in divorce.”  I think if a marriage ends in divorce, it should be like not graduating from the prestigious college to which you were accepted, attended and chose not to stay.  My husband did that with his first marriage.  He was accepted, he attended for a time and, frankly, chose not to stay when the sex dried up and the animosity overwhelmed the original urge to marry someone, anyone, who was willing to have sex with the 21 year old him..  So I lose my prestigious college mention and he is forced, FORCED, to mention an incomplete marriage experience rooted in twenty year old sexual needs.  It’s wrong. So I’ve moved to the obits.

The obits tell it like it is.  I suspect, though, thank god, I don’t yet know, NO ONE FACT CHECKS THE OBITS.  There is no snooty, although clearly not bright enough to be employed elsewhere at the newspaper, Miss Fact Checker calling to check on anything because HOW RUDE WOULD THAT BE IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH.  ”Oh, I am sorry for your loss but was Mr. Jones really a member of the Pelham Rotary?” No.  That would be wrong.  So whatever ends up in the Obits is, if nothing else, a reflection of how the dead person wants to see themselves.  Or wanted.  Or how their kids thought they should be seen.  It is also a recitation of life’s work not an announcement that some girl got lucky enough to fool some guy into marrying her and riding that bucking bronco through the land of 50% divorce rates.  No, Obits are about life’s work.  Even if your life’s work was simply having 8 kids and the corresponding 28 grandkids and loving them all.  That’s decent work.  And that is nice.  Unlike the bitches on the wedding pages who only want to make you feel stupid and bad for dropping out of college and moving to New York, having a wild fun life while you waited on tables then getting a cool job, figuring out how to dress,  how not to drink too much every night of the week,  how to talk about politics even when you didn’t know what you were talking about and enabling you to become confident enough to finally find a guy who wasn’t going to treat you like dirt even if he did have a first wife who happens to be mentioned in your wedding announcement.  But I’m not bitter.