A part of my day job includes preparing obits to run in the following week's paper.
I always try to take a moment to reflect on the names sitting on my screen. These were real people with hopes and dreams and families and worries and fears and successes and loves and full, complete stories of their own―each one far more compelling than any piece of fiction ever scribbled.
However, tonight marks the first time I'm editing one for someone I actually knew. Suddenly, every bit of punctuation, each letter, even the spacing of lines are treated with meticulous, loving precision.
To be fair, that's what I'm supposed to do. It's literally a recurring item on my weekly "to do" list. But the task lands differently when it's someone I know.
An entire life, someone's entire existence... relegated to a few lines in ink.
It never seems enough, does it? Not when we are libraries all our own, with countless stories to tell.
