Ode to the women whose obituaries aren't about them

I have written a lot of obituaries. Many of them have been for women. Grandmothers, mothers, sisters, wives, friends. Women who, when they died, left behind a legacy of quiet selflessness, according to their bereaved loved ones. When talking to their families during arrangements, I so often hear about how they lived for others, tending to them and helping them grow. But I wonder, were they ever able to tend to themselves? Children and husbands describe how they loved nothing more than being parents and spouses. Maybe they had demure hobbies like gardening, or reading, or going to church. They tell me how loving they were, always keeping a clean house and making sure their families had everything they wanted. When I go back to my computer to write such a brief summary of their lives, I stare at the blank page in front of me. What do I know about these women? The answer is often that I know so little.

It breaks my heart to write over and over again how these women are loved and remembered by the people in their lives for their service to others. Quiet unpaid labor. It goes without saying that their families loved them dearly, of course, but I wonder if these women ever got to be free, like truly free? Did they want to be? Or did they even know that there was such a possibility available to them? Do we remember them for their humor and rich inner lives? Or do we remember them for what they did for their families? Bereft of their own identities, I can’t help but feel that so much of the love that people feel for the women in their lives stems from how they care for others, what they do for them, how they make them feel. I ask, “What did your mom love to do? What were her passions?” and in response I hear, “She loved being a mother, a wife, a grandmother, a homemaker.” “She never bought anything for herself.”  “She gave everything she had to everyone around her.”

Of course, well-practiced feminism teaches us to celebrate and love everyone, and specifically every expression of women’s identity. To protect women’s choices to do as they wish with their lives–including giving themselves to home and family. But what hangs pallid in my mouth as I write these obituaries is the fear that these women had no choice. Were they making the best of their lives? Were they ever given an opportunity to be anything else? Did they steal quiet moments to savor a glass of wine alone in the kitchen when their families went to bed? Were there dishes they wanted to cook but never did because their families wouldn’t have enjoyed them? Did they ever put on their favorite record and dance in their living room? I hope so. But in the end, when the obituary is printed in the newspaper, everyone reads it with a tender heart loving that woman for what she did for everyone around her.

Obituaries are, of course, sanitized little bite-sized snippets of someone’s life, fit for public consumption. We can never know a person’s real legacy based solely upon the funeral director’s interpretation of the family’s memories of that person. But the difficult thing that I turn over and over again in my mind is what this conundrum represents: the pervasiveness of patriarchal expectations for women, the continued perpetuation of gendered roles and expressions of identity, and the prevention of AFAB humans’ unique identities outside of their usefulness to others. The expectation of domesticity and distaste for independence.

When women come into our care who have no children, were never married, or whose husbands have gone before them, somehow everyone handles it with kid gloves. How sad that there is “no one left to remember her.” These women receive pity, and just below the surface seems to be some subtext that women are only what they give to others. It tells us that women who choose not to have children, specifically, but also those who do not get married or otherwise choose “non-traditional” family structures are going to be forgotten–and that somehow their lives just aren’t worth remembering. Of course, memory can’t exist independently of those who are capable of remembering, but the quiet part no one wants to say out loud is the pervasive but silent idea that having children, and subsequently adhering to traditional family structures and gender roles, is the only way to be remembered.

Everyone, but for the sake of this rambling–women, trans folks, LGBTQIA+, and other humans who are not part of a traditional nuclear family–is entitled to live as they desire and to be remembered in meaningful ways. The reality is that we are all afraid of death. It’s hardwired into our brains. We cling to life with white knuckles and sharp fingernails, and remembering those we love, and hoping to be remembered ourselves, is the closest thing we will ever get to immortality. The reality is that we as a society value certain relationships, certain types of love, more than others. I am writing this as a deeply devout hopeless romantic who has an endless wellspring of love and affection in my heart for my partner, but is our relationship less valuable or meaningful because we have chosen to not have children–both as individuals and as a partnership? The answer is no, absolutely not–and neither is anyone else’s relationship. The platonic relationships we actively and meaningfully cultivate are just as valuable as family bonds, as well, but I rarely write obituaries that include chosen family under the “survived by” section. Being American, we live in a culture that places nuclear family tied by blood and marriage on a pedestal, especially when that relationship intertwines blood and marriage through having children; it is a culture deeply informed by white Christian ideals and steeped in all its trappings, including capitalism and misogyny. At the end of the day, relationships that are valued are those that maintain these power structures and eviscerate those that would dismantle and decenter hegemonic norms. Relationships, and people, who exist beyond the pale of the male gaze are in small but thorny ways devalued.

In this way, memory becomes a weapon. How sad there is no one left to remember her. But the reality is that we will all be forgotten eventually, and doesn’t that fragility and impermanence make the love we create now, while we are alive, all the more important and beautiful? Changing the way we think about memory, and the way we remember those we love, is an act of resistance. It creates a culture in which we can be remembered not for what we poured out of our hearts but for what we cultivated within them. Don’t remember your loved ones for their unpaid labor, for how they quietly swept up the crumbs of everyone else’s pleasures. Remember them beyond the confines of acceptable domesticity. Remember them outside of the cage of this restrictive culture. Value all of the different loves you are able to love, and relish in the deliciousness of creating a world that moves beyond the confines of that which benefits from forgetting–because when something isn’t valued, it’s not remembered, and when it isn’t remembered, it’s forgotten.