By Shannon Williams
For several years now, I have been a writer of Obituaries, I like to write and after years of writing social histories for a living in a psychiatric hospital, I got pretty good at telling the story of someone’s life. So, in the past years, when someone needed an obituary written I got the job and it is one of those things that once you start to do them, it becomes your job.

When I first started listening to someone’s life story, I was fresh out of college. I got a job at the state hospital as a social worker. The primary role of that job was to look at the patient’s life and find strengths and weaknesses that might help us as we attempted to treat their mental health problems. So, within the first three days of someone’s admission to the hospital, I would meet with them to write their social history.

Now we all know I started to work in the stone age and by that, I mean, each social history needed five copies, so we used carbon paper to type them! I am telling you it was not fun and for someone who can type fast but is an awful speller those days were a pain. A social history was a narrative document and was usually anywhere from 5-7 single spaced pages as there was a great deal of information to cover. So as a person was detoxing from substances or in the midst of a mental health crisis, I was trying to get them to tell the story of their life. I had some wonderful mentors and had also studied the work of Virginia Satir (who was a pioneer of social work and family therapy) so I got to be pretty good at asking very personal questions and not being judgmental. I called it the dumb social work look in that a person would tell you an awful fact about their life and you needed to respond with no judgement. I think the old Radio Shack stores had the same training as all you really ever got when you went to their stores was a dumb look to your questions.

So, life stories have always fascinated me and thus obituaries are very interesting to me. I have never seen such great obituaries as the Galveston Daily news has. I think it is the type of person who lives in this area, they are just very interesting and how often achieved a great deal in their life. But in the end, what is it that we want to be remembered for? Is it that we were a parent, a spouse, or had a great career, not to mention maybe we were civil minded and spend a life doing good deeds for others. Is that really what we want people to know recall about us? It is a question of life as to what will be our legacy or if we even leave one.

As you know, my mother is struggling with dementia at age 93. We are having caretakers go in to provide her some help. A lot of the time, she does not want anyone “helping her” and tells them in a very direct fashion to leave her home. I want so bad for these caregivers to know about her life, all she did and the life’s that she touched, but do they just see an old lady who is losing her mind. I also try and tell them a little bit about her, so they can try and engage her in conversation about her life but I so hope she will not be defined by these last years of her life. I guess we really don’t know what legacy we leave, but the obituary is a chance to let people know about the life that was lost.

Mo Rocca of CBS, is a fan of obituaries and has a book and podcast called Mobituaries, in which he shares the obituaries of famous and not so famous people. It is a great read and fun to listen to. You discover many things about people that you might not of know otherwise. So I will continue to write an obituary when I am asked and will read the daily newspaper about the people who have passed and what someone thought we needed to know about their life. I am planning to write my own, as I want to do make sure people know what was important to me, but it may be because I want the last word! LOL

[Jan-25-2022]