Now I’ve written two obituaries in the past six weeks. My dad died September 30th. He was 94 years old; married to mom, who left us August 14th, for 74 years. Since 1952 those two were inseparable. Dad was born during the depression, seven years before Hitler marched on Poland. He’d seen a lot happen in this world. I took the omniscient third person point of view writing the obit. As one of his three children, I might have opted for the first person narrative point of view, although the reader of an obituary will want to read a recap of dad’s journey, not a story of my personal relationship to it. That, and I have two siblings, so even as I felt it a privilege to be invited by them to write the obit, as I had for mom after she died, I understood this was our dad I was writing about, not my dad. Still, my aim was to fashion it as a story, not a chronological fact dump. The operative word there being fashion. Imagine the ignominy I’d suffer here on earth were it discovered that I’d cheated and had an AI regurgitate the obit. Or dad’s scorn should he and I meet up again in the afterlife