Writing Your Own Obituary.

• Author: Atchity, Kenneth
• Position: LITERARY SCENE

"Human consciousness does not die with the body when it has been passed along to readers."

AS SOMEONE who has been writing all my life, someone who never has experienced writer's block, it bothered me to think that another person might scribe my obituary. Doesn't that bother you, too? It just does not feel fair. Besides, aren't we way too control-freakish to wait around for the possibility that a complete stranger might scrawl "the end" and decide how to summarize our hard-won lives?

So, I decided to tell my life story myself, in my own sweet time, hoping it might provide useful information, skilled angles of approach, and a humorous way to look at things for those I someday will leave behind--as well as the recipes I know they will wonder about when I no longer am around for them to phone or text.

As a teacher of literature and writing for nearly 50 years, I always have told aspiring storytellers that believing you have a story to tell is a responsibility. "If you don't tell this story, who will?" I hoped my latest book would inspire its readers, family or not, to take charge of their own stories and report them to us. That is my challenge to you as well.

After all, who better can fashion or uncover meaning from the things that happen to you than you yourself? It is your life, after all. No one knows it better. If you cannot do justice to it at the present moment--well, doing it justice in the present moment is more than you need to worry about. You will do it someday. Just keep track of things that happen, store the evidence, and hang around long enough to figure out how the pieces of the puzzle fit together to create the unique pattern of your life.

The ancient dramatist Sophocles said, "Count no one happy until he is dead. The ending tells all." He might have been echoing an ancient Chinese proverb: "Before you judge a man, close the lid to his coffin." As a modern egotist, I beg to differ--egged on by the line from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail": "I'm not dead yet!"

Why not render judgment on yourself? It is what John Henry Cardinal Newman did in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, or the revolutionary black leader in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, or Christy Brown in My Left Foot. From St. Augustine's Confessions to The Diary of Anne Frank, from Helen Keller's The Story of My Life to the Autobiography of Red Cloud: War Leader of the Oglalas, folks great and small have heeded the call to leave to us their own version of their stories.

Since...