I cannot write the standard obituary. The obituary is expected to hold back grief in sedate, decorous ways, remember the departed person’s best qualities with quiet dignity, and forgive her less admirable aspects gracefully. When I try to write an obituary, I usually trip over my own grief and the terrible ache that the memories of the deceased one’s physical presence produce — the turn of the head, the peculiar contortion of lips forming a smile, the wave of a hand.(I cannot write obits for people I don’t feel for). To get away from that, I quickly turn to the personality, and here I find myself mired, completely unable to separate neatly those qualities that drew my admiration and those which I hated and hurt me. Far from sounding dignified, the obituary ends up structured quite like intensely physical mourning, only that it will be composed in words.

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