"Top deaths" of the year: who rates remembrance?

Now that 2010 is coming to a close, many news agencies are preparing their "top ten" lists of people who died during the year. These feature packages, complete with photos and blurbs, usually inhabit leftover feature space along with best movies, weirdest news events, etc.

It begs the question, "Who is worth remembering?" Our culture is obsessed with sorting and ranking human worth, and those who pass into the Great Beyond are not exempt from that. Of course, the mere existence of Obit Patrol shows that I am part of the whole crazy impulse to identify "notable" lives -- even though it implies that to not receive notice in print or on line if you pass away means your existence was meaningless. The dead escape our judgment, much as we'd like to think they don't.

And what about my limited perspective? I know as much as I can about passings in America, Europe, Australia, and parts of Asia. Language and culture separate me from so much of the rest of the world. I place as many significant lives from little-known areas of the world as I can each week, in the hopes that I can expand our sense of who's out there and what they are up to. Western culture has ethnocentric blinders on, and I hope Obit Patrol will help to bring more people, ways of life, and amazing experiences out of the periphery.

In six months of Obit Patrol, I have created approximately 1,500 obituary links. Each year, approximately 57 million people die worldwide. Obviously, the ratio is ridiculous. Even though I am documenting deaths, I can't give you a Top 10. The criteria that selects current significance is based in the petty concerns of the living, and will shift as time passes. One hundred years from now, will we remember the sitcom star, or the surgeon, or the human rights activist, or the guy who juggled frogs? And in what order? Who has made the most lasting impact for good?

That's impossible to say. Death is the great leveler, and posterity can't be touched by human hands. For all we know, it's those among the masses of the unsung who make pivotal changes that affect our lives today and generations to come -- people who will never have a monument or memorial.

Every human life is significant, long or short, good or bad. When I make my highly personal choices of lives to highlight, I hope that I am reminding us of what good we can do for each other, and what light we can bring to the world, in each of our crazy, busy, frustrating, humbling life spans. My tiny slice of lives remembered will have to stand for the whole.

Nearly everyone I know loses someone close to him or her in the course of a year. This post is dedicated to you and the web of souls that surrounds you, to the memory of those who didn't get a write-up but who lived and fought and loved and gave. May they rest in peace.