> SOUTHERN INDIANA — A few days ago, I received an email that had a link to the obituary of an old friend and colleague of mine who passed away last March. I first met Malcolm almost 40 years ago. He was my supervisor at the first job I had, down in Mississippi, after finishing graduate school.

A few years later, he hired me to work in Daytona Beach, Fla., with him. He was the best man at our wedding. Over a lifetime of job changes and moves, we lost contact. I think the last time we saw him was almost 18 years ago at a retirement party for a mutual friend.

For people who make a lot of moves in their lives, the folks they leave behind become sort of frozen in time. Since there may not be any contact, it is shocking to realize that they have also grown older and changed. People who go to reunions or reconnect with old friends or classmates on Facebook can readily attest to this.

We tend to think of these people as they were, doing the same things they always did.

In the age of the Internet, Google and Facebook it is harder to kid yourself, since they constantly confront us with the harsh realities of the world. We learn not only about people who have passed away, but also about things like arrests, divorces, bankruptcies and friends whose political beliefs apparently have become completely irrational.

I wonder if we are really better off not knowing all these things. Twenty years ago, I’m sure I would have never learned of Malcolm’s death and I would have always assumed that he was still spending his weekends making his roux for crawfish etouffee, listening to Randy Newman, fishing for sea trout in Ponce Inlet, cutting up and belly-laughing with whomever was lucky enough to be his companion. Like Schrödinger’s cat, in my timeline, he was alive and well until the email changed all that.

Although Malcolm loved to talk “psychology” and was really fun to be with, he also was the source of a lot of heartache for his family. As a prototypical southerner, he happily fulfilled the line from one of his favorite songs, “We drink too much and we laugh too loud.” A mutual friend once told me the best word that described Malcolm was “enthusiast” in its original sense. In the Middle Ages, an enthusiast was someone who was possessed either by an angel or a demon.

Malcom’s very bright and capable wife must have written his obituary and she cast a rather saintly spin on his frankly bacchanal ways. She emphasized how he taught his boys to make a proper fire and how to roast a whole pig, but she also had to edit out a lot of stuff. She focused on his work and positive family life events and no doubt that was the way he would have liked to have had his story told.

A few years ago, I was sent another obituary. This one was a psychiatrist I had once worked with long ago. He was quite a character and his obituary was more than two pages long, single spaced. Knowing him, it was obvious that he had written it himself and spent a lot of time at it. It graphically portrayed him the way he saw himself and how he wanted the world to remember him. It was no surprise that his favorite song was Sinatra’s “I Did it My Way.”

ABC News recently reported how writing your own obituary or hiring a professional writer is becoming more and more popular. Facing death, Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs commissioned writer Walter Isaacson to write his authorized biography. It was sort of an extended obituary, partially intended to explain the hard-driven Jobs to his often-neglected children. The fact that he had to hire someone to do it is particularly telling.

Writing your own obituary represents your chance to get in the last word, as well as an opportunity to whitewash or sensationalize your life. If you need help, there is a website that encourages people to write their own obituaries and even provides helpful hints (www.obituaryguide.com/writeyourown.php).

Writer Barbara Bryan of Davidson, N.C., teaches a course on how to write your own obituary. She told ABC News that her students “at first think it’s macabre, but then they realize, ‘you know what, if I don’t do this someone could really mess this up.’”

Val Patterson, an electrical engineer who died of throat cancer in July, shocked his friends and colleagues by using his self-written obituary to get some things off his chest. He confessed that he stole a safe from a motel back in 1971. He also owned up to the fact that he never held a Ph.D. from the University of Utah, as everyone believed.

He wrote, “the day I went to pay off my college student loan, the girl working there put my receipt into the wrong stack, and two weeks later, a Ph.D. diploma came in the mail. I didn’t even graduate … In fact, I never did even learn what the letters ‘Ph.D.’ stood for.”

It may just be a matter of emphasis, but I suppose most people have at least two life stories they could tell. I suppose an obituary doesn’t have to pass a fact check like political speeches these days. It only needs to be, as Writer David Sedaris says, “True enough,” or as Steven Colbert says, full of “truthiness.”

— Terry L. Stawar, Ed.D., lives in Georgetown and is the CEO of LifeSpring the local community mental health center in Jeffersonville. He can be reached at tstawar@lifespr.com. Checkout his Welcome to Planet-Terry blog and podcast at www.planetterry.wordpress.com.