In 1953, wrapping a happy post-grad year at St. Andrews University in Scotland, my mother traveled to London for the coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth. It was early June and early post war, and vast crowds celebrated.
No sooner had she and her friends seen the queen’s face in her coach on the way to Westminster Abbey than the news skittered over the tops of the crowd that Great Britain had “conquered” Everest. After Britain’s war time — with widespread bombing and loss of life, while food rationing continued — the city exulted.
(The summitters were actually Edmund Hilary of New Zealand and the Nepalese-Indian climber Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, but never mind, British expedition.)
Recently I flew from home in western Colorado to Annapolis, Maryland, where I grew up, to visit and help my mother, age 95 and still living in her home. She is in three book clubs, one of them established in 1964, and a decades-long women’s coffee group. She goes to movies, lectures, and the symphony. With her boyfriend.
Our chief objective was to work on her obituary together.
LEFT: Alison Osius’ mom, Nancy. RIGHT: Alison Osius. (Photos provided by Lisa Zimmerman)
My friend and colleague Mary Turner, of Santa Fe, concurred, advising, “Write your mother’s obituary while she’s here and healthy. Not later, under duress.”
Mary’s father died a few months ago.
“I’ve been telling everyone to write it while their parents and grandparents are still here, because it is so hard to do under pressure while you’re grieving,” she texted me. “I wrote my dad’s the day after he died, and it was stressful trying to remember everything and make the newspaper deadline.” Any piece of writing benefits by sitting before you send.
Some eight years ago, when my mother had impending back surgery, she and I drafted a basic obit. My siblings were alarmed when I shared it, wondering if there was something they should know. But working on it was a way I could help out, and I knew we should compile information, which takes time and effort. Mom and I managed something serviceable, and she came out of her surgery fine. But our basic obituary was boring, and she is not.
In the weeks before my trip, I’d made a few notes, actually quite a few notes, in the Google Doc where the draft obit resides. One note referenced the coronation story.
My mother said, “Well, I don’t know if that needs to be in there.”
“Mom,” I said, “you’ve seen things not many people today have.”
She’s always said that experiencing the two major events in a day “was the most exciting thing imaginable.” As we sat down to work, I asked whether either event was more momentous.
She paused a second, and said, “Everest.”
Neither of my sisters knew the story, nor did one of the two honorary sisters (my stepsister did not, and my cousin had only heard it a few months ago). My brother, though, while FaceTiming my mom and me that week, recalled it and that her group of friends had staked out their curbside spot.
Mom tipped her head, her eyes sliding rightwards and then lighting up. “Forty hours!” she said. “The number just popped into my mind. That’s how long we held the space.”
An underappreciated form of journalism
When I was a student at Columbia Journalism School, a professor called obituaries “an underappreciated form,” historically assigned to new reporters. Yet obits are important and resonant, and composing one is like writing a profile. It takes research and fact checking, and, beyond that, is your chance to give a proper accounting, even to do one last thing for a person.
Judith Crist, another of my teachers and a distinguished critic, once told us an apocryphal story of how, upon the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s death, a reporter assembled an obituary. An editor read it and barked, “Where’s the Twinkle?” That was an homage to another tale (a myth), that Mozart wrote the ditty “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” at the age of 5. An obituary cannot leave out a signature fact, even a small one. Student friends and I would sometimes ask each other afterwards, “Where’s the Twinkle?”
Mom and I spent peaceful afternoon hours absorbed in our task, our laptops side by side on the glass dining-room table where I have had so many graciously presented meals. Down the hill, the Severn River flowed past, over half a mile wide. We talked about sailing on the Chesapeake and skiing in Vermont and Vail with our original family, also her later boat trips and travels with my stepfather, Fred Zimmerman, a retired Navy captain and, like my dad, a keen sailor. My mother was married to my father 30 years, Fred 20, twice widowed.
Our first draft had outlined her various jobs, but we added more intel. After her year in Scotland, she worked in Washington, D.C., at The Washington Post as a “copy boy,” with Phil and Katharine Graham and their children coming in and out of the office. The saucy Jack, another copy boy, took a shine to her, putting notes on her spindle, toying with the name of his rival, my future father, Ted Osius, a medical student at the University of Michigan in her home town of Ann Arbor.
“Is Dr. Odious coming to visit?” he’d ask. Or “Dr. Opprobrius” or “Oasis.”
Once Jack and my mother were picnicking at the Tidal Basin when the vehicle of a new driver rolled through the crowd and into the Potomac River, barely missing them, but striking and killing a little boy on the waterfront with his aunt. Jack took a picture of the car floating in the water, and it appeared on the front page of the paper.
We did not put that part in, just remembered it all, writing that in 1954 she returned to Ann Arbor as a staff writer at The Ann Arbor News, and she and my father married in December.
Only the evening after our co-writing session did I realize that my mother’s obit so far said nothing of her character and what a good listener she is, how inquisitive and blessed with humor. In my own writing, I often test out humor on the phone with her to see if she laughs. I almost always show her article drafts, and she reacts and edits, sometimes applauding, sometimes saying, “You’ve got work to do.”
She fought some things in the obituary, arguing that they sounded braggy, and diluted my phrasing for how often she entertains friends and family down to the tepid “enthusiastic hostess.”Our family often had dinner guests, and we kids always felt we could ask our friends, and we went on to invite people regularly to our own tables. My mother gave birthday and holiday parties, believing in hospitality and gathering people together.
She and I also updated the para giving (potential) survivors, with the mournful duty of taking some people off. Among them were her two older sisters and finally her brother Kermit at age 102.
We also added her beau, Fred Hallett, age 97, a retired executive, historian and sailor. They began dating when he was 90 and she, 88. (As Mom knew both Freds through the Sailing Club of the Chesapeake, I refer to it as her personal dating service.)
Flying back to my own home, I left her with the Google Doc in hand, teasing that at a certain point, “I can change it back.”
My stepsister this year organized a wonderful group gift of a digital picture frame that rotates through hundreds of family photos. A few times during my visit, Mom pointed quietly at a certain photo, indicating that it could work for our purpose.
The end comes to us all, and she is comfortable with the subject. The collaboration gives us time together as well as time to get things right.