My interest in the obituaries page of the newspaper started when I lost a young friend in a plane accident almost twenty years ago. He was only in his thirties and studying for his PhD in UK. He was flying back after a short vacation in Europe when his plane crashed. All the passengers survived, except him and the pilot. I learnt of his death from a friend, and after the funeral, could not help thinking, as I looked at his obituary photo with the bright, confident smile of youth, of the vast dereliction of wasted hopes and dreams in human lives.

Since then, I have looked out for the same photo every year on the anniversary of that tragic death, and have developed a rather morbid interest in obituaries in general. A few times I have gasped to see the picture of someone I knew well, accompanied by the usual words expressing the family’s love and sense of loss . One was of a friend whom I used to play mahjong with, whose death, I later learnt, took place in hospital during a critical operation. I returned from my vacation too late to attend her wake or funeral.

Another obituary that provoked the same shock was of someone I had met at a friend’s house, many years ago, an extremely successful bank executive who, I was later told, had died of a heart attack in his sleep, while on a posting in a foreign country. My shocked reaction must be typical of thousands upon receiving news of the sudden deaths of friends: ‘But I just saw him recently, and he was in the best of health and spirits!’ The occasion I was referring to was his fiftieth birthday party, at which, surrounded by loving family and admiring friends, he was at his zestful best.

Many of my friends—mainly those past sixty, very rarely those younger than forty—have this same dark interest in scouring the obituaries page. Indeed, the interest could become something of an obsession, as it clearly did in the case of a friend who says that the page is the first she turns to, when she picks up The Straits Times every morning. It is the day’s obligatory reading. Never mind if the rest of the paper gets chewed up by the dog!

This Obs Ob, as we jocularly call it, is certainly true of another friend, a woman approaching seventy, who says that she reads the page with great deliberation—and a red pencil. For she has somehow got into the habit of circling the age of each of the deceased, if it is less than hers! Some days, she says, more than half the obs are circled. ‘Some of them are not even half my age,’ she says somberly.

Why in red? I can understand the sense of profound relief/gratitude/satisfaction in being still alive when so many younger people are gone, but why the colour red? When I asked, she said, ‘Don’t know. But it has to be red!’ Maybe the traditional Chinese beliefs about this lucky colour, as opposed to black or even dark blue, have a strong influence on her. Maybe red, the colour of blood and passion, is exactly what is needed to offset the gloom of the obituaries.

Whatever the source of our interest in this page of the newspaper, appropriately consigned to the last section, after the pages devoted to two of life’s strongest affirmations—sports and business—it must have something to do with our sense of mortality. On the one hand, we want to remind ourselves that death is the ultimate destiny of all, that life is ‘fragile’, ‘tenuous’, ‘transient’, ‘unpredictable’. On the other hand, we want also to remind ourselves that while it lasts, we should never take it for granted, but live it fully. ‘Carpo diem’ has become something of a mantra among my fellow seniors.

This life-affirming instinct, the scientists and psychologists tell us, is so powerful precisely because it is the same as the basic survival instinct itself.

‘I mean to live to a hundred,’ says the Obs Ob woman with the red encircling pencil, and recognizable hearty laugh. ‘I wonder how many would be able to do the same with *my *obituary!’

It may not be a bad thing to bring one’s sense of humour even to the subject of death and mortality.

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About Vignettes...

A continuing flow of little, readable pieces that will constitute what I feel is an important 'legacy of values' to leave behind. Read more about Vignettes...