My friend Christina sent me this report on a study, which gets filed in the Let’s Prove The Obvious file under “Nonetheless interesting.”
The study, which is in the current issue of the Omega-Journal of Death and Dying, looked at obituary photos published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. It found that the number of images depicting the dearly departed at a much younger age than when he or she actually died more than doubled between 1967 and 1997. Women were shown at to be at least 15 years younger twice as often as men were. This, said the report,
“suggests that Americans may have become more biased toward youthful appearance, particularly for women.”
Ya think?
I like to taunt my husband, who hates to talk about what will happen when either of us dies, that I want to be cremated because at least I’ll finally get to weigh very little in death. But OMG IT’S A JOKE!
I suppose you can’t blame the dead person for her own obituary picture, unless her deathbed wish was, “Please publish that shot, you know, the one I really like of me in the red dress I wore to Jacob’s bar mitzvah after I’d had that bacterial infection and lost all that weight?” I’m sure there are a handful of people like this, but I’d like to think most folks who know they’re dying are spending their last breaths telling their loved ones how much they mean to them.
No, it’s probably those loved ones choosing the pictures, and of course they’re trying to pick the ones that show the person in her best light. But that person in the snapshot was not the one who died so much as her Formerly, someone who she probably left behind a long time ago, for better or worse, almost certainly for both.
I’d like to think that by the time I die (knock formica that will be many decades from now) I will no longer want people to mourn my Formerly, so much as whoever I am then. Then again, who knows? Ask me on my deathbed. Knock formica we’ll be onto another topic by then.
May 20, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Knock knock. This is morbid and lovely both. I kind of like that combo. Go figure.
May 20, 2009 at 2:08 pm
I guess it depends how old the person is and how they died. Someone in their 40s who dies in an accident, I agree it would be weird to show a photo of them 15 years younger. But someone very elderly and/or who had a long lingering illness, it may be that their loved ones wanted to show the deceased when they (the loved ones) perceived the deceased to be most him- or herself. When my mother-in-law passed away recently, she had been fighting cancer for nearly 10 years. All the photos the family displayed at her memorial were of her before she got sick, before she lost her hair (which is the only way I ever knew her). They wanted to remember her when she was young(er) and healthy and vital and happy. Which made sense to me. You could argue that she did a lot of important happy living in those last years (like, hey, welcoming a daughter-in-law and a granddaughter into the family) but I think those photos, at that particular time, were also painful to look at for many family members.
May 20, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Maybe all the obit photos were taken in the 1960s–perhaps there was a special at Sears or something. That would make the VERY SAME PHOTOS “recent” in the 1960s, but “older” at later times.
But no, you have to jump to the conspiracy theories.