Obituaries in the News: Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick

Johnson-Reddick's obituary which reportedly came from her surviving children, was printed in the Nevada's Reno-Gazette Journal on Tuesday. The text of the obituary, which has since been pulled from the website, is as follows:

Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick born Jan 4, 1935 and died alone on Aug. 30, 2013. She is survived by her 6 of 8 children whom she spent her lifetime torturing in every way possible. While she neglected and abused her small children, she refused to allow anyone else to care or show compassion towards them. When they became adults she stalked and tortured anyone they dared to love. Everyone she met, adult or child was tortured by her cruelty and exposure to violence, criminal activity, vulgarity, and hatred of the gentle or kind human spirit.

On behalf of her children whom she so abrasively exposed to her evil and violent life, we celebrate her passing from this earth and hope she lives in the after-life reliving each gesture of violence, cruelty, and shame that she delivered on her children. Her surviving children will now live the rest of their lives with the peace of knowing their nightmare finally has some form of closure.

Most of us have found peace in helping those who have been exposed to child abuse and hope this message of her final passing can revive our message that abusing children is unforgivable, shameless, and should not be tolerated in a "humane society". Our greatest wish now, is to stimulate a national movement that mandates a purposeful and dedicated war against child abuse in the United States of America.

If this came from the surviving family, her six children, then it is the official obituary. Because this was done online, it is difficult to say that this was genuinely done at the request of the survivors. I understand RGJ's stance on pulling the obituary until further details could be known, because this currently could present an issue of libel if the allegations are false. I am somewhat surprised that it was not caught prior to being printed. It should not have seen physical print without verification from all the surviving family members. A death notice would have sufficed instead. I've not seen a negative obituary come through the funeral home, but I'm not entirely sure how it would be best handled. 

Strange News of the Day: Morgue Worker Notices Crash Victim is Still Alive

 

This sort of story is always going to be popular on news feeds especially not too far from Halloween. Readers find themselves dealing with deep-seated fears of being buried alive when they hear about cases of this nature. While being buried alive is not likely to happen in first-world countries, we know that it has happened in the past. 

In the U.S. autopsy is generally required for any unattended death, accidental death, possible homicide, etc. I would say that this is the same for Germany as the story reads as if she were in a morgue for a medical examiner, coroner, or equivalent for autopsy rather than a morgue at a hospital or funeral home. It is sad that she was there several hours before anyone noticed breathing, but it still might be what saves her life. Had it been until they had gotten around to making the first incision for autopsy, she might have already passed away while in the morgue.

I think what really scares people about stories like this is not the idea of someone being in a place that is connotative of death when they are still alive. I think it is because we do not speak of death in Western culture with anything other than trepidation. We try to deny that it exists or beat it back as far and as long as we can even though we know logically that we all die at some point. Death is often seen as a negative thing, even in belief systems that promote life after death. I prefer to speak about death as it is and acknowledge its importance in the life cycle.

Writing obituaries

Today News published an interesting article entitled Thieves ransack homes of families attending funerals that, at least on one hand, might make you lose faith in humanity a little bit. Thieves have been targeting families who publish their obituaries in the paper with basic information as to where they live. It is really rotten that someone would exploit people at one of the weakest times in their lives.

As part of my position, I help families write obituaries. I'm not going to say that everyone "should" go through a funeral home, but we protect everyone's privacy with due diligence. Even when it comes to something like writing the obituary. I never insert the location of surviving family members. Close friends and family will know where you live. Otherwise, the funeral home is always more than happy to forward on any mail related to the services. It's a small part of what we do for other members of our communities.

Having someone housesit during the funeral is an excellent idea especially if you are traveling out-of-state. Smaller communities might not have to worry about this threat, but I would still consider it. It will allow you to have a little less stress during the grieving process. A lot more goes on with funeral arrangements than most people realize, but having to worry about whether someone is going to try to steal from you while you are attending a service should never be a factor.

So Many Changes

No surprise to any logical thinkers out there, 2013 arrived without the world ending. Or if it ended, it restarted without a hitch and with none of us any the wiser for its death. As far as apocalypse predictions went, this one was not nearly as fun as the rapture. I would have loved to have seen more pictures of the sort of people who had randomly disappeared and left their clothes behind.

Women might wish the world had ended if politicians and religious leaders keep pulling the same old bullshit they have been. Men who love women probably should feel the same way, but I have seen that for too many men, we are still some foreign creature that is somewhat human but not quite as human as they are. The heart of the problem is that people need to stop taking other people for granted regardless of biological sex, chosen gender, sexual preference, religion or lack thereof, nationality or ethnicity.

And for the love of sanity, can we please stop allowing churches and other religious groups to run countries, especially this one? That's why America was founded in the first place if people would bother to remember their bloody history. I love the land of the free and the home of the brave, but so much of America has lost that rebel, independent, spirit. Where's the outrage for that?

I suppose I'll stop politically ranting for five seconds. I'm just honestly heartsick for what has happened to my country.

Our former funeral director left and our new one starts this week. The rest of January is going to be a time of awkward transitions. We have a new funeral director who just moved to town and is going to be working with me tomorrow. With any luck, I'll be enrolled in my classes for the semester by Friday and pursuing some formal business administration training.

And in case you think I really haven't been writing, here's a tiny sneak peek from something I'm tentatively calling Deadly Nightshade:

"Belladonna Goodfellow pushed herself up from the floor slick with blood. Her head throbbed, her vision swam, and her thoughts came out as exclamatory clouds in her psychic coffee. Bent almost at the waist she swayed back and forth towards the front door and pushed her way to freedom."

The Issue of Plagiarism in Mass Media

High school might be the first time you get a real taste of what it means to cheat and why should not do so in terms of our education. Through college, we continue to learn to be extremely careful about how we reference source material and how we credit those sources. The Zakaria issue suggests, however, that there is some form of disconnect between what we learn during our undergraduate or possibly even our graduate academic careers that is permissive in how much we appropriately credit our borrowed phrasing.

Perhaps rather than focusing on plagiarism as much, however, somewhere people are losing the ability to express their own thoughts either in reaction to material or as building upon their research. Perhaps it is not so much a matter of dishonesty as we have so many people in our country who do not wish to think for themselves. It's difficult not to be dismayed at the thought that mass media, for all its positives, has created an environment where the anti-intellectual nature of our country has done more to shape how some professional writers craft their works than the desire to inform, entertain, and improve. Can we realistically consider journalists in this era of "new media" to be professional writers at all?