The Lovely Dead

My day at work consisted of looking up dead people.

The info I already have goes like this:

Name: Kent R. Johnson
Date of Birth: May 17, 1919
Date of Death: June 6, 2009
Age at Death: 90
Address: 1552 Whispering Willow Lane, Cornville, Iowa.

And then I would find out that Kent had left behind over a hundred grand to someone. Go, Kent. And I would imagine Kent's life, growing up on the family farm, running barefoot in the summer and helping with the chickens and the pigs and the cows. I imagined him a young man going off to war, leaving behind his sweetheart who swore she would wait for him. I imagine his return, marrying the sweetheart, having beautiful fat babies that he'd wrestle with on the living room floor and submit himself to be their horse when they were old enough to do it.

Of course, Kent smoked a pipe. He never read much more than the local newspaper and the Bible, but he liked the radio. He rarely drank to excess, was lean in middle aged and slightly bowed in old age.

He loved Verna until the day she died and then until the day he died.

It's all very Norman Rockwell, isn't it?

Then I run across John A. MacTweedy, who is exactly my age. I actually Googled him and found out that he has four grown daughters, a grandchild, and leaves behind his wife and parents. I stopped myself from doing Google maps on his address because I realized that I'm stalking dead people.

I don't have access to the system yet that spews out death certificates and I'm not anxious to get it. I don't want to know that John A. died of cirrhosis of the liver because he drank like a fish. It's bad enough to face forty dead lives every day. I'll make up stories about them that always ends with them having a happy, peaceful, contented, painless death as they exit the world among their loved ones, having had a wonderful life.

Their facts glimmer at me in pixels and then are gone and I'm left to fill in the blanks. Which I gladly, gladly do.

To me, they all lived in Greenville Illinois with young Ray Bradbury where we all ran on our Para-Creme Lightfoot sneakers and our mothers made dandelion wine.