The obits

Being, for better or worse, a child of my parents, I am an avid reader of the obituary section of the paper. The Irish sporting pages. Yeah, maybe it's morbid, but it's a rare opportunity to read about just people. Not in the sense of living-lives-of-righteousness (which might be the case), but in the sense of being the people you see on the bus.

Anyway. In the Plain Dealer, the obituaries very frequently include pictures. Moreso than in any paper I've ever read. It's humanizing. It's also interesting--a lot of the 95-year-olds who've died are accompanied by recent pictures of them. But just as many feature pictures of them from their youths. For women it's often wedding pictures, few of which feature smiles. They seem serious. This shit is not for joking. (More of them smile in the old-age pictures.) In their young-version pictures, the old guys often have military portraits or elaborately combed 1950s yearbook hair.

The worst part, though, is that people seem to die really young here. Today there was a picture of an infant--she didn't have enough hair to have a bow, so she had one of those ruffly elastic bands around her bald head. (Infant mortality in the US is .65% according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; in Ohio it's .73%. And, holy shit, for black non-hispanic women in Ohio, it's 1.48%. That seems insane. Imagine if one in every 75 people you know had a sibling who died as an infant.) A few days ago a three year old was in the obituaries. And before that there were others.

In Cleveland, apparently it's not rare to die around age 50. Even more alarmingly, a not insignificant number die in their teens, twenties, or thirties. Teenagers. Seriously. The paper rarely lists a cause of death, so it seems like an inexplicable pandemic is spreading. What makes these people die? Crystal meth? Gunshots? Car crashes? The whole thing makes me want to shop at that Mexico City store where all the clothes are bulletproof.

Miguel Caballero it is.

PS--Highly worthwhile to poke around that web page.