A few days ago, El Punt Avui published three obituaries at the bottom of its obituary page, which caught my attention because of the different way, but always sparing in words, in which they summarized the lives of their respective protagonists. Jordi Martínez de Foix, Catalan independence activist and member of the Communist Party of Spain (International), who died at the age of 21 in 1978 while handling explosive material, was remembered as a "victim of the Spanish transition". Max Cahner, who was the promoter of Edicions 62, of Curial, of the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana and Minister of Culture in the first Government of Jordi Pujol, as "builder of State structures" (and he was fired with praise from several presidents of the Generalitat and other Catalan heroes). And Frederic Pena Puig, a citizen without the public prominence of the previous ones, was discreetly described by his profession and disposition: "Physicist and doctor (and poet of life)".
The obituary, like the epitaph, has something of a self-portrait (if the deceased writes it, before palming) or a portrait (if his relatives write it, whether they are relatives, friends or colleagues). The resulting texts, in one case and in another, are not always totally reliable. Because, whoever its author is, he often takes advantage of the sad hour to try to give one last like to the ideas that the dead man defended in life or, simply, to reflect the spirit with which he faced his existence, already exhausted. All this leads me to think that the obituary is overrated. Some consider it the passport to posterity. And it doesn't go that far.
It is true that not all obituaries are as solemn or mythologizing as the first two cited here. There are others that catch our attention due to their unexpected light or festive tone. Like those that remind us of the hobbies of the dead; for example, those dedicated to a culé (published in La Vanguardia), in which his descendants informed him about the progress of the team in the league season that he could no longer follow. Or like those that express the indignant grief of those who have lost a loved one; for example, the one published last June in a Tenerife newspaper: “Both H.P. I live and our mother dies”. Or like those that reveal a funeral-proof humor, louder than the death bells, like that of the Barcelona notary who apologized to his "relatives and friends for having had the audacity to die without their permission" and then finished off the obituary: "I won't do it anymore". If this variety with black humor edges of the obituary genre were of interest to the reader, I allow myself here to refer you to the internet, which is a mine. And with this I close the excurso joker.
What is it and what can you expect from a obituary? In principle, it is an announcement in which family and friends notify their acquaintances of a death and invite them to the funeral. (Because, as the great Yogi Berra warned, “if you don't go to your friends' funerals, then they won't come to yours”). But, for others, the obituary is a small piece of publicity for the greater glory of a cause, in which the deceased is a mere instrument, defined with a thick line, supposedly heroic or in tune with the phrases in vogue.
If they want to be remembered for what they were, without reductionism on the part, what is convenient is not a obituary, but a memoir. The complexity of the human being who aspires to tell who he was demands it. François de Chateaubriand said when he began to write his Memoirs from beyond the grave at the beginning of the 19th century: “I write mainly to give an account of myself to myself (...) Nobody knows what happiness I was looking for: nobody has completely known my heart (...) Today that I continue longing for my chimeras, without chasing them, because having reached the peak of life I descend towards the grave (...), I want to explain my inexplicable heart”. And having said this, he wrote thirty more years, until completing a text that in the monumental translation of Cliff totals 2,722 pages, and that he should not see the light (but he did) until after his death. Like the obituaries.
Excuse the funereal air of this note, attributable to the proximity of All Saints' Day, in which the Church evokes its deceased, already released from purgatory, happy in the beatific, eternal life... and safe from hyperbolic obituaries.
