According to a front-page article in The New York Times of Sunday, November 5, 2006, online obituary sites are struggling with ugly postmortems. Rude, crude, lewd comments are finding their way into guestbooks at sites like Legacy.com, the most popular of the type.
People! People! A little modicum of civility, please. Didn't anyone ever hear of "Requiescat in pace," which is Latin for, "Dude, show some freakin' respect!"
Some examples:
Reading the obit, he sounds like he was a great father. His son Peter.
Peter, where did you go to school? If you're going to bitch, put a comma after the word "son."
Or:
I sincerely hope the Lord has more mercy on him than he had on me during my years reporting to him at the Welfare Department.
Get over it, will you?!
The article noted that the Web sites hire full-time screeners to weed out the ghoulish resentment-harborers. Another common one is sneakier:
"Most often it's cases of Sue posting that he was the love of my life and then we check and the wife's name is Mary."
Ouch.
The piece quotes someone named Kenneth Doka, a professor of gerontology. (Shouldn't we either be talking to Miss Manners or a therapist?) Doka notes that people who have "one-click immediacy" in a "culture of candor" are saying things they'd never say in a handwritten note or in a handwritten guestbook at a funeral home.
Really?
Look, folks, do the honorable thing. Hurl the brickbats at me now. Throw the pies in the face while you have the chance. Diss me now.
Before I pull a Virgina Woolf. . .
. . . Or a J. Alfred Prufrock, seen above, trousers rolled, debating whether to eat a peach, listening for those mermaids, baby, singing each to each.
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