Has anyone checked out the obituaries lately? Have you noticed how many people are dying young?

I was glancing through the New York Times when I first noticed it. I thought it was some bizarre illness that had taken the lives of people in New York. I started to read and realized that the photos didn’t match the obituaries.

I’m not an avid obituary reader, so I hadn’t noticed it before. I started to pay attention over the next few weeks. It seems that people are submitting obituaries of loved ones with photos of what they looked like in their twenties. How bizarre - even in death, people have to look younger. You can’t appear to be old even if you die old.

So Ronald Harris, who helped build the George Washington Bridge and died at age 98 , is pictured in jeans and a hard hat on top of a bridge girder. That photo must have been taken before 1935 when the bridge was completed.

Rosemary McMurthry died at age 102, survived by two of her three children, her nine grandchildren, 20 great-grandchildren and six great- great-grandchildren. She is sporting a fashionable upswept hairdo and diamond pendant earrings. She doesn’t look a day over 21 years old.

Does selecting a photo from when someone was young mean that we don’t value who they became when they grew older? Is this how people want to be remembered? Isn’t it all right for them to look old when they were old? Especially if they died old?

I don’t get it. Do you?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 8:51 am. Visit the archives for all blog posts.