Getting drunk and writing your obituary is a totally normal thing to do, right?
Our main character, Bud, is shuffling through life. He writes obituaries for his local newspaper and he isn’t particularly good at it.
His wife left him a few years ago and he’s never really gotten over it. When he gets an invite for his wife’s wedding to the guy she left Bud for, it sends him in a bit of a tailspin.
He has a few too many drinks and decides to sit down to write his own obituary. But because his life has been so dull even he can’t stand it, he makes up fantastical lives for himself.
It’s all pretty harmless, except for the fact the doesn’t do this in a journal or a private Word document. No, he does it in the newspaper’s online system he uses to write obituaries. And then he accidentally hits publish. And, no, there is no way to unpublish an obituary once it’s been published.
Obviously his boss is furious. It seemed like he was already hanging onto his job by a thread, and this antic was the nail in the coffin of his career.
So they bring him in to fire him, but there’s a glitch. Because his obituary was published in the newspaper, their system has him registered as dead and they can’t fire a dead person.
Bud is put on a sort of weird suspension with the understanding that he will very much be fired just as soon as they can figure out how to resolve this glitch.
In the meantime, he hangs out with his neighbor and landlord, Tim, a former art dealer who was in an accident in his younger days that has had him confined to a wheelchair ever since. So Tim knows a few things about life throwing you a curveball and the grieving process that follows. He also knows the importance of coming to accept your life as it is and moving on.
I can’t remember why, but Tim and Bud start attending funerals together. Not funerals of anyone they know, but if they see a notice for a funeral, they’ll show up and see what people have to say about the recently deceased.
This is where Bud learns that a person’s life isn’t reduced to a list of facts or accomplishments, but how they made the people around them feel. How they showed up in life.
When they see a woman at more than one of the funerals they attend, they recognize a kindred spirit and strike up a friendship with her, and eventually she and Bud become romantically involved.
This is one of those man-facing-a-midlife-crisis books that deals with life and death and “what it all means.” So it is sad and bittersweet, but with enough humor injected throughout the dialogue to bring some levity to the subject matter.
This book by John Kenney isn’t the best book ever written, but it is time well spent with some good characters. Also, I listened to the audiobook and the narrator did a great job, especially with the dry humor that defines Kenney’s voice in this book.