Think about what an obituary is.
It’s the collaborative effort of a newspaper writer and a deceased’s loved one to tell the abridged story of a person’s life.
It has to be dignified. You have to paint a picture and do the person justice. But it’s still Cliff Notes of elegies, meaning there’s not a lot of room in obituaries for stuff like, “He loved every ingredient on Supreme pizzas but the olives.”
Which is why a section in a New York Yankees fan’s obituary is so very moving: After presumably narrowing down the list of things they believed were important to the deceased, the fan’s family knew they couldn’t talk about her love for the New York Yankees without mentioning her intense distaste for Alex Rodriguez.
The obituary appeared in the Star-Ledger (h/t BlackSportsOnline.com’s Glenn Erby) on September 30.
The deceased was Helen Fowler, an 85-year-old Yankees fan who loved the team all her life except for that one Rodriguez fellow:
Devoted wife, mother, and grandmother, and lifelong Yankees fan Helen [Emanuel] Fowler, 85, passed away on Sept. 29, 2015, at the Chelsea in Fanwood, N.J. Born and raised in New Rochelle, N.Y., she was a resident of Cranford, N.J., for 53 years. …
… Fowler was a former member of the Cranford First Aid Squad and a lifelong Yankees fan, with the exception of Alex Rodriguez.
That is awesome. Not because Alex Rodriguez necessarily deserves your hate. That’s a personal thing everyone has to decide on their own.
What I love is Helen’s dedication to the sentiment. She saw so much baseball, probably had so many opinions on the game—and the one that stood out to those she knew best was her towering, undying dislike of A-Rod.
I can’t even begin to fathom the amount of high-quality trash Helen must’ve talked about Rodriguez. Obviously, it was not an insignificant part of who she was. And as a confirmed member of the International Player Haters Union, I appreciate that kind of commitment to letting people know when you think something is trash.
Rest easy, Helen. You’re a monument to New York sports.
Dan is on Twitter. He realizes now he has to step his sports hating up.
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