It must be one of the world’s hardest writing assignments to put together an obituary.
After all, not only do you have to sum up a person’s entire life in one page, but you have to do it after you’re just started grieving them. And that likely has a lot to do with why they tend to be solemn pieces that focus on the departed’s most beautiful aspects and encourage others to celebrate and appreciate life itself.
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But of course, people with outrageous senses of humor die too. And we can often find that there’s no better way to honor memories of the joy they’ve given us than to make their obituaries as sarcastic and irreverent as they were.
And so despite the fact that I didn’t know one woman who recently passed on, I find it hard to imagine that she wouldn’t approve of the no-holds-barred tribute her son left for her.
When Andy Corren of New York City described his recently deceased 84-year-old mother (not pictured), he gave the impression of vivaciously bawdy woman who lived life on her own unpredictable terms.
In the obituary published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , Corren spoke of Renay Mandel Corren’s penchant for dirty jokes and mildly illicit substances, her shameless affairs, and her skills in bowling, cribbage, and cards.
That said, he also advised treating her as the unreliable narrator of her own life story.
In his words, “Yes, Renay lied a lot. But on the plus side, Renay didn’t cook, she didn’t clean, and she was lousy with money, too.”
But while his mom’s obituary appears to savage her at first glance, it also paints a compelling picture of a woman who has experienced and endured a lot in life.
It’s hard to know whether Corren was just taking his mother at her words when he wrote, “Renay was preceded in death by her ex-boyfriend, Larry King,” but there’s no doubt that she indeed survived COVID-19, pneumonia, serious infections, blood clots, and two different bouts with breast cancer.
And he also wrote frankly about the devastation she felt after losing her daughter in 2007. But even that section hints at this daughter’s own bizarre adventures, including what he called “one eyeball lost in a near-fatal Pepsi bottle incident that will absolutely be explored in future obituaries.”
And to carry on her legacy of disrespect, Corren said her memorial will carry a similar vibe and take place “most likely at a bowling alley in Fayetteville, NC.”
In his words, “The family requests absolutely zero privacy or propriety, none what so ever, and in fact encourages you to spend some government money today on a 1-armed bandit, at the blackjack table or on a cheap cruise to find our inheritance. She spent it all, folks.”
