I was reading the paper this morning, what’s left of it, and found myself again in the Obits. I don’t read it to see if I am there so much as I do for some kind of, I guess, morbid entertainment. In a serious vein, there was a man 37 years old that died of a heart attack. Ouch!
Looking ahead at my eventual demise I always check to see what the 80 & 90 somethings die from. Most times, if stated, it is usually cancer, the occasional heart attack or pneumonia, often a side effect of some other chronic illness. Knowing that in most if not all instances someone other than the deceased has written the obit I am curious about how the death is described. Most often people just “die” however the next most common description is that they have “passed” or “passed on”. If so, passed on to what? The dictionary version I read said it was a “polite” way of saying died. From Wikipedia I also learned that Passed Away Vol. 1 is a compilation of Dr. Dog tunes. I noted that if you pass someone or something, you go past them/it. So in this sense a person is passing life on the way to something else.
This brings me to the next group of descriptions. These, I assume, are religious descriptions of what has happened. I find, “was called home” “went to his/her reward” “met his maker”. I have never read where someone has “gone to hell” but I suppose that on more than one occasion that might be the opinion of the writer. If you know what I believe concerning religion then you will understand that at this point I’ll just let sleeping dog lye (or lay).
Next time I’ll take up my possible choices.
irreverendt 