Before he slipped away on New Year's Day, this is what Hornby Island's Billy Little said he wanted written on his tombstone:
Billy Little
Poet
Hydro is too expensive
"But," he continued, "I'd like my mortal remains to be set adrift on a flaming raft off Chrome Island."
Those wishes were tacked on to his self-penned obituary:
"After decades of passion, dedication to world peace and justice, powerful friendships, recognition, being loved undeservedly by extraordinary women, a close and powerful relationship with a strong, handsome, capable, thoughtful son Matt, a never-ending stream of amusing ideas, affections shared with a wide range of creative men and women, a long residence in the paradisical landscape of Hornby Island, success after success in the book trade, fabulous meals, unmeasurable inebriation, dancing beyond exhaustion, satori after satori, Billy Little regrets he's unable to schmooze today. In lieu of flowers please send a humongous donation to the War Resisters League."
Now that, dear reader, is an obituary. That is how, with good humour and panache, we should all have the courage to go out.
Of course, Little had an advantage in expressing himself: He was dedicated to the written word for most of his 65 years. Raised in New York, he was a teenage U.S. army soldier who quickly morphed into a peacenik after getting out in 1963. He became interested in the poets of the Beat Generation and the Black Mountain school, and eventually drifted to sa国际传媒 in the early '70s: Hornby, Comox Valley, Vancouver. He was notable as the poet Zonko at anti-'Nam protests in Vancouver, where he had a couple of bookshops, worked at the SFU library, wrote and published. "He knew more about poetry than most of the poets I know, and I know most of them," said his friend Jamie Reid this week.
So, yes, Little, who died of cancer, had a leg up when it came to writing his own exit lines.
Alas, many obituaries resemble Wikipedia entries, offering more about what the subjects did than who they were. The worst eulogies veer between sanitized and mawkish, leaving us with a Disneyfied deceased. In her book The Dead Beat, Marilyn Johnson notes that North America obits tend to celebrate the extraordinary qualities of ordinary people, while the Brits are more irreverent, painting a fuller picture of the departed. For vivid portraiture, nothing beats this opening passage by sa国际传媒 reporter Richard Watts in 2003: "Rude and foul-mouthed, Dr. Jim Buchan was possibly the most brilliant physician and keenest mind to ever live on Saltspring Island. In a community that prides itself on its acceptance of eccentrics, Buchan stood out as an eccentric who sometimes pushed even Saltspring tolerance too far. At the same time, nobody seems to doubt his intelligence, professional ability, generosity of spirit, or his moral decency."
Good obits can say a lot with a little: "Agate, population 70, is one of those towns that people describe as 'blink and you'll miss it,' wrote the Denver Post. "Lois A. Engel loved living in the blink." The Atlanta Journal-Constitution captured artist and prankster Carole Connely in a single telling detail: "If her husband dozed off early, she handed out washable markers to her children to decorate him while he slept."
An all-time favourite obit ran in the New York Times: "Selma Koch, a Manhattan store owner who earned a national reputation by helping women find the right bra size, mostly through a discerning glance and never with a tape measure, died Thursday in New York. She was 95 and a 34B."
But those were all obits written by others, not by the deceased. Billy Little's self-penned farewell makes you wonder how your own would read. We often live lives of deferred greatness, waiting to achieve our goals, to become the people we want to be, until after the kids are gone, the mortgage is paid, whatever. An obit can be like saying, "oops, too late."
As for Billy Little, that tombstone remains a possibility, says son Matt, as does the idea that one warm summer evening as the sun is setting off Hornby, a bit of Billy's ashes might find their way onto a raft launched in the direction of Chrome Island.
