This is how I feel about eulogies and obituaries. It's from John Steinbeck's The Log from the Sea of Cortez:
We wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality. We knew that what we would see and record and construct would be warped, as all knowledge pat-terns are warped, first, by the collective pressure and stream of our time and race, second by the thrust of our individual per-sonalities. But knowing this, we might not fall into too many holes--we might maintain some balance between our warp and the separate thing, the external reality. The oneness of these two might take its contribution from both, For example: the Mexican sierra has "XVII-15-IX" spines m the dorsal fin. These can easily be counted. But if the sierra strikes hard on the line so that our hands are burned, if the fish sounds and nearly escapes and finally comes in over the rail, his colors puls-ing and his tail beating the air, a whole new relational exter-nality has come into being---an entity which is more than the sum of the fish plus the fisherman. The only way to count the spines of the sierra unaffected by this second relational reality is to sit in a laboratory, open an evil-smelling jar, remove a stiff colorless fish from formalin solution, count the spines, and write the truth "D. XVII-15-IX." There you have recorded a reality which cannot be assailed--probably the least important reality concerning either the fish or yourself.
