Kamloops resident Tamara Vukusic has been reading the obituaries for over 20 years. She wrote Obittersweet: Life Lessons from Obituaries to share what she learned.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED / Tamara Vukusic

Tamara Vukusic's fascination with obituaries started when she was in her twenties, and she's been reading them ever since.

The Kamloops resident reads obituaries from local papers, places she's lived in Canada, and anything that is sent to her. 

For years it was a hobby she didn't talk about much, but that all changed last November. 

"I read something in an obituary that I loved, and I shared it online," she said.

She was encouraged by friends to write about it and submit it to The Globe and Mail, and when she did, they published it. The next day she got a call from Mosaic Publishing, asking her to turn it into a book.

“That was a dream call for me, and so I did," she said.

She already had a large collection of obituaries she had kept and reflected on over the years, so the book came together quickly.

Obittersweet is a collection of 120 life lessons learned from obituaries, dating as far back as 1999. Each of the twelve chapters has ten life lessons, each gleaned from an obituary excerpt. Along with each life lesson, Vukusic delves into personal anecdotes and insights related to the obituary. 

"To me, it’s not my book," she said. "It’s a tribute to all these people I’ve learned from over the years, and I want to share them."

One of the most important lessons she's learned is what matters most at the end of a life.

"When I read an obituary, it’s so much about the essence of someone that matters, not what they accomplished in the Western definition of success," she said.

One of her favourite excerpts is only five words long: "She was a frog whisperer."

"That one sentence says that she was tender hearted, and she had the capacity to care for the smallest creatures. I could instantly picture her, down on her elbows, looking at a frog, appreciating it, protecting it," she said. "In life we want to impress others or boost ourselves up with these very traditional marks of success. But at the end of the day, we love the frog whisperer. And that takes a lot of pressure off."

Over the years, Vukusic has noticed trends in the obituaries. People have become more candid, sharing vulnerability in their tributes, talking more openly about the mental health of the deceased. Amid the pandemic, she noticed another change.

"The number of obituaries has grown exponentially, there’s a larger section," she said. "Part of that is because people are writing longer obituaries."

Her theory why is that people aren’t able to gather for a tribute to their loved one in person so they're doing it in prose.

"The obituary now plays a more important role in sharing those stories and filling the gap than otherwise would’ve been filled by an in person gathering," she said.

The obituary has become one of the few ways to safely honour a loss and process grief during the pandemic. 

As the pandemic restrictions have also changed her plans for a traditional book launch, Vukusic wrote each of the 120 lessons from her book onto Christmas ornaments and hung them on a tree in her front yard.

Kamloops resident Tamara Vukusic celebrated the launch of Obittersweet: Life Lessons from Obituaries by decorating her tree with nuggets of wisdom from her book.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED / Tamara Vukusic

"I've been sending some pictures to some of the families whose loved ones are mentioned in the book," she said. "For a number of those people, this is their first Christmas without a loved one. It's a very silent, but poignant and intimate launch." 

Although the local launch of her book has only just begun, and it won't fully launch in Canada until the New Year, Vukusic is already planning another. 

"Speaking to family members to get permission to use obituaries… there's some stories from that process I'd love to share," she said.

An obituary is a distillation of an entire lifetime, she said, the most important things about a person in the eyes of their loved ones, narrowed down to about 600 words.

While that is an aspect of obituaries that she finds intriguing, it also leaves a lot unsaid. This is what she hopes to explore in her next book.  

To purchase a copy of Obittersweet: Life Lessons from Obituaries, locals can visit the Kamloops Chapters. You can also order her book through independent book stores before it launches across Canada in the coming months. 

— This story was corrected at 12:13 p.m. Friday, December 11, 2020 to change a misquote to "Frog whisperer."

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