Writing a Piece of My Obituary

On Sunday, I started receiving emails from several people I know from work – some recent and some from 20 or more years ago – about a man we all knew and had worked with. He and his wife had gone out to dinner Saturday with friends, came home, and went to bed. He woke up in the early hours of Sunday – and died of a heart attack.

I had worked with him in 1980s. We were part of a group that spent a lot of time traveling back and forth to Canada for government hearings, usually in Toronto but occasionally in Ottawa. The hearings were held two or three times a month, and for a good year our lives were defined by those trips: leave Sunday for the hearings, which usually lasted three days. Stay at a hotel. Sit inside of a government hearing room from nine to five. Spend from five to seven talking about what had gone on. Then dinner. Then work. Then sleep. Thursday, and sometimes Friday: fly back to St. Louis.

My job was to be a resource for the one reporter covering the hearings. That’s right, just one reporter. But that reporter’s stories became the stories published across the country and in the United States.

Most of the people in our group didn’t like the reporter, staunchly believing she was biased against the company. So there was an education process for our people, and an education process for the reporter.

The more I was in Canada, the more I loved the place, and the more I could see the differences with the United States. In 2005, my wife and I spent a week in Montreal, and I think we both could live there, at least six months a year.

The guy who everyone called and emailed me about was the strategist for our group in Canada. He could find ways around the most formidable obstacles. He could come up with some of the most innovative, creative ideas. And he was the one who had to explain to the executives in St. Louis when things went well, and when things didn’t go well.

On Sunday, after the emails, a phone call came. Could I write an article, essentially his obituary? The hope was that it might be published in the newspaper, but that was a long shot; the newspaper staff usually writes these articles and they tend to favor people well known in the community or who’ve accomplished some major thing in the community. (An obituary article yesterday was about the former dean of the School of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis who had played a major role in the creation of the St. Louis Arch.)

So I write the article. It was difficult finding facts. A lot of old Human Resources records no longer exist, or they moldering away in some warehouse. There wasn’t a lot I could find on Google; most of his career happened before the electronic revolution.

But I finally got enough information together, and worked the draft over several times. The writing was troublesome, for several reasons. There were personal feelings involved. There was the challenge of not having enough information. And there was the feeling I was writing a piece of my own history, my own obituary. An important part of my past career was going to be buried.

What I knew about the man, and what I learned while writing the article, was this: the important part of a person’s life is not the great achievements, the innovative strategies, the miracles that get pulled off for the company. No, the important things are the two children, the three grandchildren, and the work of sitting on a board month after month to provide services for children. It’s the friends who are mourning. It’s the wife who thought there were still a lot of years left, to travel and enjoy life. It’s the church where we worship every Sunday.

It’s all those things we take for granted.

Over at Faith Barista, Bonnie Gray is hosting a Blog Carnival on faith, with today’s topic being what God is teaching you in the “white space.” To see how people responded, please visit Faith Barista.

Photograph: Sunrise by Simply Darlene.

Learning in Times of Whitespace

As I’ve mentioned before, I threw my back out a couple of weeks ago while working in the garden. I’ve done it before – but this has really been taking a while to heal. It’s better (thank you for the prayers) but it’s still not 100 percent. I can tie my shoes by myself now, though.

When it’s difficult to move around, doing normal things like getting in and out of a car or rising from a chair (not to mention washing your feet in the shower – you should have seen that contortion, uh, no, maybe you shouldn’t), you become acutely aware of your body and movement. You learn to do things in different ways; yes, I’ve actually closed the car door from the inside of the car with the end of a cane.

Biking is out right now, but I can take walks. I’m doing physical therapy (that poem on Tuesday was not something I made up) and I’m doing exercises at home. I also read a book called Healing Back Pain by Dr. John Sarno that tells me I need to have arguments with my brain. He may well be right.

So things I normally do, things I don’t even think about, are beyond my capabilities. So it’s a kind of “whitespace time,” waiting for things to return to normal so I can get back to taking everything for granted.

I’ve learned something, though.

I don’t begrudge the accommodations made for disabled people. They need those wide parking spaces near the entrances of stores. They need sidewalks that slope to the street. They need ramps to get into buildings. The American Disabilities Act may drive a lot of businesses, governments and other organizations crazy in its implementation, but until you’re disabled yourself, you don’t realize how important access is. You don’t even think about it.

Yes, people survived and made do for centuries without the ADA, but those simple accommodations mean the difference between “close to normal” and “something less than close to normal.” Yes, laws like this can and will be taken to ridiculous extremes, but they’re still important and needed.

So for a few days I was allowed to park in the visitors’ parking lot at work, and it meant a short walk and – best of all – no stairs to get to my office. I didn’t even consider the stairs I had to climb from the regular parking lot to my office (some 55 steps distributed among four flights of stairs). I learned to appreciate a computer bag with wheels, even if it looked dorky – I could easily take my computer home (we’re required to do that) with having to inconvenience someone to carry it for me.

There was an unexpected benefit, too. I can’t sit for very long in a meeting, so I explain to people and then stand. Perhaps it was my imagination, but meetings became shorter. You should try it sometime, even without throwing your back out.


This week at Faith Barista, Bonnie Gray is talking about whitespace – and what you learn when you find yourself in life’s whitespace. To see more posts, please visit Faith Barista.

I Hate PowerPoint

I hate PowerPoint presentations.

Part of the reason why, I suppose, is that when it comes to speeches and presentations, I’m a traditionalist. I prefer words, written and spoken. It’s today’s popular culture of visual communication, I’m something of a Neanderthal.

My lack of hipness notwithstanding, I also understand PowerPoint enough to know that very, very few people actually know how to use it effectively.

They don’t know, for example, that it was designed for charts and graphs. Not words.

They also don’t know that every study done on the subject demonstrates that the maximum number of words for an effective PowerPoint slide is – believe it or not – six. And that’s the maximum.

When was the last time you saw only six words on a PowerPoint slide?

We see a blank slide on our computer screen, and we immediately set ourselves to doing what we have the technical capabilities to do – we fill up that blank slide with words, charts, graphs, colors, photos, embedded videos, visual jokes and anything else we can cram on it. We make the slides so complicated that no one – including ourselves – can understand them.

But they look impressive.

If you’re in the audience listening to a speech or presentation, and the speaker is using PowerPoint slides, what do you look at – the speaker or the slides? (Answer: the slides – they’re usually better looking.) And if the speaker reads the slides, do you follow his or her voice, or do you let your eye race ahead to finish reading the words on the slide? (Answer: The eye is faster than the speaker’s voice.)

In fact, everyone might be a lot better off to forgo the speaker altogether and just slow the slides, perhaps with some appropriate Muzak playing as background.

Unfortunately for all concerned, the person of the speaker – body language, voice, personality, physcial appearance, clothes – is a major portion of any speech – some say well over half of the actual communication that happens. And in a PowerPoint presentation, all of that gets lost.

The slides overpower the speaker, and they overpower the message. Everyone forgets that often the most important thing you can do is leave a lot of whitespace on a slide. It provides emphasis and focus, not to mention needed rest from the presenters who never met a whitespace they didn’t immediately try to fill up.

The whitespace in our lives is like that. We have it, but we usually try to fill it up with activities and stuff. Yet that whitespace is the rest time, the thinking time, the quiet time that we need to let be quiet. It’s the time when God speaks most clearly, or when we’ve pushed away all the distractions we allow to invade our lives or we embrace in our lives so that we can hear God speaking clearly.

Whitespace can be simply sitting and reading from a familiar Bible passage, and discovering something you’ve never seen before. Or it can be just sitting. Or lying down. Or walking. Or riding a bike (I had to throw that in there). Taking a hike. Or even, as my wife will tell you, turning off the stupid BlackBerry.

We need whitespace. We crave it. And we can reclaim it.

We can also wage guerilla warfare against PowerPoint presentations. But that’s another post for another time.


To see more posts on whitespace and spiritual rest, please visit Bonnie Gray at Faith Barista, who’s been hosting a blog carnival on rest during the month of March.

Photograph: Blank Monitor by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.