When a baby is born a certain amount of information is sent out to the friends and acquaintances of the parents of the child. It's usually a photo with a name (if known), date and time of birth and the weight of the child.
It's a convention that we don't seem so keen to follow when someone dies. I think that's maybe a shame. In death we are similarly reduced to statistics on our gravestone. There's still our name, a starting and finishing date and there's a brief comment about who we were "loving father", "much-missed son". We are usually defined by our relationship to others. This is how future generations will judge us. At least the ones like me who like to walk around graveyards looking at graves and contemplating my own mortality.
But I think it would be nice to add to the gravestone the completed statistics on the weight issue. So the starting weight would be recorded there, but we'd also find out what the person weighed at the moment of death. If you're going to have a record and reduce people to statistics then you should do it properly.
"I'm sorry to tell you madam that your grandmother has just passed away," the doctor would say, "But before you start to grieve, could you just help us pop her on these scales?"
If it was the convention then no-one would mind. After all no-one thinks twice about weighing a baby after it's just gone through the trauma of birth. It would be interesting to everyone to have a start and a finish weight as well as a start and a finish date. It might present problems if a person had been blown up in an explosion or burnt up in a fire, but I think it would still help people to get through the grieving process if they had to gather up all the bits and get them weighed. And surely the completion of the statistics is the most important thing here. What use is a starting weight if we don't discover what weight the person ended up? If there was more room on the gravestone I would propose a graph of the person's weight every year through their life, so maybe if the person was an important dignitary and had a big monument to them you could do that. For normal folk a start and end weight would be enough. That's all their life would amount to, plus whether they were a parent or just a child of someone else.
And if we're going to create this new convention then why not go the whole hog. If we send out pictures after people's births, why not afford the same privilege to someone after their death? Wouldn't it be good to get an email announcing someone's demise with a picture attachment of them moments after the event. Perhaps lovingly cradled in the arms of their smiling family. Or the family could look sad. Whichever seemed more appropriate.
It's just weird the way people don't follow things through. And birth and death are the two most important events in our lives. Surely they should be catalogued properly. Plus if I were to die of a prolonged wasting disease then future generations would think that I had lived my life as a thin person. Which would go some way to making up for the prolonged wasting-style death.
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Question 23
I like poker. Which previous winner of the World Series of Poker did I knock out of a tournament earlier this year?
