Mad Writing Skills

    I thought of a new career or at least temporary vocation for myself, but it was shot down.  I'd thought I could enter the job market as a translator, not for another language per se, but as a translator of cursive writing.  Since it's not going to be a focus of the Common Core curriculum, and is destined to be no longer taught, it seems there might be a need for interpreting cursive script in case some of the newly educated wonder what those historical documents actually said, or how to unlock the mystery in that cache of old love letters uncovered in somebody's attic.  But alas, my hopes for a new career were dashed when it was pointed out, correctly perhaps, that the secrets of cursive could be unlocked by computers, and more efficiently than I would be able to do.  Moreover, reading further I find that perhaps while teaching the laborious task of writing cursive may become obsolete,  schools may teach only how to read it. So I turn my thoughts of writing to another format:
      I was intrigued by an obituary notice I read in last week's paper. Obituaries used to be standard, formulaic documentation composed by the funeral directors in concert with newspaper editors. But increasingly, the prose of obituaries has taken off in widely disparate directions.  I was told once, by someone in a position to know, that contemporary obituaries have often been written by the deceased.  That would account for the listing of survivors including beloved  pets, even lizards, as appeared in a recent obituary.  But the death notice that caught my attention described the deceased as having died "while resting alone."  He loved lighthouses and daschunds, the obituary went on, and appeared as a stoic and ascetic loner with  a haunting air about him, "a walker between worlds, neither dead nor alive,"  suited to life as a lighthouse keeper or in residence at an Irish monastery.  Very compelling and fanciful impressions of a life, until the illusion-shattering line that, "His mother was not among those he held dear."  According to the notice, his mother has been dead for some years, so the motivation for  the jarring note will never be clear, at least to the uninvolved reader.   I'm not sure I could compete with the force of whoever wrote this particular obituary, but it makes me think maybe, for a start, I should construct my own.  We may have no control over what is said about us after we die, so this could be our last chance to set the record straight.