Ball Cap Obituaries

However people want to portray their loved ones in a newspaper obituary is fine by me. It is great people continue to use obituaries as a form of expression. I understand the cult followings people have: for a sports team, a political party, a brand of consumer products, and the like. Want your recently deceased loved one in a photo of them wearing a Busch Light logo on a ball cap? You be you. Anymore, anything goes in an obituary.

It is okay to run an obituary in the newspaper without a photo. In fact, that may be the best practice. I’m not big on fakery in presenting a self-image. I have a hard enough time determining what is my own personality, let alone how that should be represented in an obituary photo. It was only the growing number of men donning ball caps in their obituary photos that got me thinking about this.

I own a lot of ball caps. If my survivors print a photo of me in the newspaper with my obituary, I hope it is not one with me wearing one of them. First of all, which one would they choose? I would likely prefer the one from a portrait of my Sears and Roebuck little league baseball team. I suppose people would recognize me. It would speak to the potential of youth.

A current hat wouldn’t be good as I wear them in the yard to absorb sweat while gardening or doing yard work. My current fave is a commemorative cap from when we moved the Standard Oil and Amoco paper archives from Chicago to a salt mine in Oklahoma. That project was a really big deal, yet I wear the cap because it has ventilation for heat from my head to escape. It is not a statement of anything.

I wrote the obituary for my survivors to use. It is 210 words with the briefest of traditional items. There is a sentence about my education, one about military service, one about marriage, and one about my formal career. I wrote a sentence about retirement. Just the facts in tightly written prose. One omission is a photo. I must remedy that so my death is hassle-free for those who survive me, yet am loathe to do so.

The easiest thing would be to visit a professional photographer and have them take a head shot. Maybe fancy it up with a white background so it shows well in a black and white newspaper. The issue causing delay is that living on a pension finds more interesting things on which to spend my limited funds. For example, I could buy a new hoe… something I could actually use. An obituary photo hasn’t even made it to my to-do list. If I do visit a photographer, I won’t be taking any ball caps.