What Makes Up a Life?

October 20, 2025

Recently I was writing an obituary for my aunt who was also my Godmother. My cousin sent me a brief outline of dates and high-level information to include, and I was asked to put it all together, a real honor.

As I read the sketched info, I knew it was all true, but the dates and names failed to capture the essence of who my aunt was. It made me think: what is it that makes up our lives? How can a few paragraphs really sum up who we are as human beings? The short answer is, of course, they can’t. There is no way a few words can capture all the nuances of a person.

But then I thought about some of the snippets I’ve heard from people in Guided Memoir Writing. While I don’t know Jane’s dad nor will I ever have the full picture of who he was, her story about the lambs he rescued from slaughter on a neighboring Michigan farm, taught Jane to bottle-feed, and then gave her the responsibility of midnight feedings, tells me he’s a man I would have liked to have known. I hope this story was included in his obituary.

So I dug around a little, both in my memory and on Google for stories about Aunt Lamar. I have spent many afternoons tromping through family cemeteries with my aunt, finding the tombstones of distant relatives and hearing snippets of their lives. I doubt Aunt Lamar ever passed a cemetery she wasn’t at least tempted to wander through.

From my cousin’s outline, I knew that my aunt had been heavily involved in her town’s historical society, and through Google I found out her work had prevented many of the older homes in their town from being torn down, including the one she and my uncle had purchased. In honor of that work, their 1869 home had been named “The Lamar Webb House”. That was a story that needed to be included—and even though I didn’t mention the cemeteries in the obit, the two details snapped together like jigsaw pieces.

A story can breathe so much more life into who someone is or was than a list of facts!

The last time I saw Aunt Lamar, in June, she knew me most of the time. When I strongly encouraged her to smile for a photo for me to send to my dad, her brother, she obliged, and then laid her frail hand on mine, looked me straight in the eye, and said very plaintively, “You are driving me insane.”

I cracked up. The Aunt Lamar I knew was definitely still there, and I loved her for saying it.

Then she pointed to my shoes, shook her head, and grunted. I guess my sneakers didn’t pass muster. That made me laugh too, and it reminded me, again, that our lives are not lived in the broad strokes of dates and big accomplishments but in the small details that reflect who we really are.