About obituaries

Probably every issue of this newspaper ever published has contained at least one story or item about a death. That’s because when we share our lives and community together, we also share our passings.
We are marked by the deaths of longtime friends, neighbors and their family members. We share the tragedy of fatal accidents and the grief of a sudden or unyielding illness. A death in a small community like ours is a death in the family.
What are the reasons we look to newspapers to print the local obituaries? What do we want them to tell us? Why do even the brief obits of people we barely knew sometimes bring out deep reflections about ourselves or our loved ones?
Our local newspapers lately have been too busy covering deaths, especially the more tragic and horribly premature. The unfathomable loss of Healdsburg’s Drew Esquivel, the scholar-athlete who won a full scholarship to MIT, killed by a drunk driver on a sidewalk in Brooklyn became too much. Too much loss, too young, too much dashed promise.
Just age 21, Drew’s death is the kind a whole community mourns because of what might have been and because of what he already had shown us. Hundreds of his friends gathered Friday in the Healdsburg Plaza for a candlelight vigil.
Another large gathering will take place tomorrow for a memorial service for Kent Mitchell, 71, a former mayor of Healdsburg who died while on a river outing with his three granddaughters on July 8.
Inside both issues of the newspaper that reported Mitchell’s and Esquivel’s deaths were other obituaries, too. They all become pieces of our community cloth, stitched together by births, weddings, reunions and funerals.
Last summer it was the funeral of Cloverdale’s Angelica Contreras who was killed at age 16 by a drag racer on the town’s river bridge. The summer before it was Windsor’s Nate Torres, 15, a Windsor High School sophomore, killed in the crossfire of gang member intruders at a neighborhood party.
Just days apart from Drew Esquivel’s more public death and subsequent vigil, a former Analy High School scholar-athlete died a lonely and dark death, victim of a heroin overdose.
Although very popular with many friends and a well-known Sebastopol family, her obituary will not be published and her passing will be too little noted by her larger community.
Not all deaths end in tragedy. Newspaper obituaries tell the stories of ordinary, well-lived lives as well as some of the more renowned or extraordinary. Told all together, they are part of the story of us.
Just in the last two weeks, the following obituaries were printed in the local newspapers.
A retired Lutheran minister died quietly at age 93. A native of Switzerland who had lived in Sebastopol for the past 35 years with her husband and small family died at age 73. A man with the nickname “Goose” because he delivered Granny Goose potato chips for a living died of heart failure. He lived in Sebastopol and was recently retired.
Tom, a man more known for his radio-controlled model airplanes than his long career in the gas station business, had enjoyed a very long life that none of the tragic teen victims mentioned above will ever know. But his brief obituary shared the same newspaper space this month. He was 95.
Susan, a cancer victim, died at her home surrounded by family. She was 60. Steve   was a Vietnam War vet but was better known as a friendly clerk at Fircrest Market. Recently retired, he died July 12 at age 70. There also was Ivan, a longtime employee at Healdsburg’s Silveira Pontiac. He died at age 78. In his family-written obituary he was called “one of a kind.”
And that is true of all our newspaper obituaries. They are all one of a kind, but they are also one of ours.
— Rollie Atkinson