SAMPLE ONE

A Life Well-Rooted

Dolores "Lola" Reyes Fontánez, 1941–2024

Lola Reyes Fontánez spent eighty-two years doing the things she believed in: feeding people, keeping her word, and refusing to let anyone in her vicinity feel invisible.

She was born in Caguas, Puerto Rico, the third of seven children, and came of age in a household where the kitchen was the center of everything and resourcefulness was the mother tongue. She emigrated to New York in 1963, settled in the Bronx, and spent the next four decades working as a home health aide, a seamstress, a school lunch supervisor, and, for one remarkable stretch in the 1980s, a numbers runner — a detail her grandchildren love and her daughters prefer not to discuss.

She returned to Puerto Rico in 2004 and spent the last twenty years of her life in Caguas, in the house she had always meant to come back to. She grew herbs in painted coffee cans on the porch. She watched telenovelas without apology. She made the best arroz con pollo anyone who ate it could ever agree on, and she knew it.

Lola died on March 4, 2024, at home, surrounded by her daughters Carmen and Ivelisse, her son Miguel, seven grandchildren, and a cat she claimed not to like named Presidente.

She did not suffer. She had said everything she needed to say. She left a kitchen full of people who knew how to cook because she had insisted on it, and a neighborhood that will be quieter and less itself without her in it.

She is survived by her children, her grandchildren, and everyone she ever fed.

SAMPLE TWO

All of It at Once

River James Holloway, 1978–2023

River James Holloway died on November 19, 2023, in Knoxville, Tennessee, after a brief illness. He was forty-five years old, and he was, by all available evidence, one of the more interesting people in any room he entered.

He was a landscape architect by training and a baker by compulsion. He would arrive at a dinner party with a sourdough loaf he'd been nursing for four days and act like it was nothing. He cared about soil in a way that his friends found slightly excessive and his clients found deeply reassuring. He could tell you the difference between a space that had been designed and a space that had been felt, and he spent most of his professional life trying to build the latter.

He had lived in Knoxville for twelve years, having arrived from Seattle by way of a cross-country drive he said he'd needed and never fully explained. He put down roots there in the most literal sense: a garden that his neighbors still talk about, a sourdough starter that has now been in continuous use for eleven years, and a circle of people who became, over shared dinners and borrowed tools and the slow accumulation of ordinary days, the family of his life. They were an improbable crew: a retired nurse named Gloria, two artists who ran a screen-printing studio, a couple from his block who showed up one winter with a snow shovel and never really left. It was Gloria who sat with him at the end. It was all of them who held the memorial, in the backyard of the studio, with good beer and his bread, baked from his starter the week he went into the hospital.

River's chosen family asked that this obituary say, plainly: he was loved completely, and he knew it. He was seen and known fully, and he felt it. Whatever difficulty had come before, and some had, the last chapter of his life was one of genuine belonging. They want that on the record.

He is survived by Gloria Martín, Theo and Alejandra Suárez-Vance, Mark and Debra Kowalski, and a chosen family too numerous and too fierce to list in full. He is survived by the bread starter, which Gloria has promised to keep alive. He is survived by the gardens, which will bloom again in spring without him, which is the thing about gardens.

He was funny. He was stubborn. He grew the best tomatoes anyone had ever tasted. He deserved more time.

SAMPLE THREE

What She Carried

Maricel Abad Orozco, 1955–2024

Maricel Abad Orozco was a woman who knew how to carry things. She carried her family from Medellín to Miami in 1989, with two suitcases and the particular determination of someone who has already survived the hardest part. She carried her work, twenty-six years as a licensed practical nurse, most of them in a pediatric oncology ward with a steadiness that the families she cared for have not forgotten and will not. She carried her grief quietly, after the fashion of her generation, and she carried her joy the same way: fully, without announcement, as though happiness were a private matter between herself and the people she loved.

She came out to her daughters in 2019, at sixty-three, in the kitchen of her apartment in Hialeah, over café con leche, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. To her daughters Carmen and Valentina, it was not ordinary at all, it was a gift, a door opening in a house they thought they knew. To Maricel, it was simply the truth, finally spoken aloud. She had carried that, too, for a very long time.

She spent her last years in a community of women, some from her church, some from the LGBTQ+ seniors group she had joined with characteristic practicality, some simply neighbors who had become, over shared meals and afternoon walks, the texture of her daily life. She traveled to Puerto Rico twice, to Cartagena once, and said, each time she came home, that she had everything she needed right where she was.

Maricel died on February 11, 2024, at home in Hialeah, with Carmen and Valentina beside her.

She is survived by her daughters, her four grandchildren, her sister Esperanza in Medellín, and a community of women who learned, from her, that it is never too late to tell the truth.

SAMPLE FOUR

An Ordinary and Extraordinary Life

Harold "Hal" Brennan, 1942–2024

Harold Brennan — Hal, to everyone who knew him longer than ten minutes — died on January 8, 2024, at his home in Metuchen, New Jersey, surrounded by his family and the particular clutter of a life thoroughly lived. He was eighty-one years old.

Hal was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the son of a transit worker and a telephone operator, and he stayed close to home for most of his life in the way that people do when home has been good to them. He worked thirty-four years for the Middlesex County public works department, retiring in 2004 with a party he said was too loud and a watch he wore every day until he couldn't. He was a parishioner of St. Francis of Assisi for over fifty years, a season-ticket holder for the Giants for almost as long, and a man who held genuinely strong opinions about the correct way to make a pork roll sandwich.

He married Patricia Coyne in 1968. They were married for fifty-five years, which is to say they were married through every version of themselves: young and broke, middle-aged and tired, old and grateful, and all the states in between that don't have names. Pat died in October 2023, three months before Hal. Those who knew him say he was ready.

He is survived by his children Kathleen, Dennis, and Susan; six grandchildren; his sister Rosemary; and a neighborhood that knew his name and will miss seeing him on the porch.

Hal Brennan did not change the world in any way the world keeps track of. He showed up for his kids, loved his wife, did his job, and tried to be decent. In the accounting that actually matters, that is quite a lot.

SAMPLE FIVE

A Good Dog

Biscuit, 2009–2024

Biscuit — formally Biscuit Marie, though she never answered to either name with any particular urgency — died on April 3, 2024, at the age of fifteen, peacefully and in the arms of the person who loved her best. She was a beagle mix of uncertain but enthusiastic heritage, and she spent her life in Portland, Oregon, doing exactly what she pleased.

She came to her family as a rescue in 2010, already a year old and already fully formed in her convictions: she believed in long walks, longer naps, and the strategic deployment of soulful eye contact at mealtimes. She did not believe in thunderstorms, the vacuum cleaner, or being left alone for more than forty-five minutes, a boundary she communicated through a range of vocal expressions that her family described as operatic.

She was a steadfast companion through two cross-country moves, one pandemic, three job losses, a divorce, a remarriage, and the ordinary accumulation of grief and joy that constitutes a human life. She did not understand any of it, and she stayed anyway. That, her family says, was the whole point.

Biscuit is survived by Elena Vasquez-Kim, who adopted her; by Marcus Kim, who came along later and won her over with cheese; and by their daughter Paloma, age seven, who learned to walk holding onto Biscuit's ears and has not yet fully understood that she is gone.

SAMPLE SIX

What We Lost When We Lost Them

The Bramble Cay Melomys (Melomys rubicola), ?–2019

The Bramble Cay melomys — a small brown rodent, round-eared, unremarkable to anyone who did not know them — was formally declared extinct in 2019. They had lived on a single coral cay in the Torres Strait, between Australia and Papua New Guinea, for thousands of years. The cay is less than three acres. The sea took the rest.

They were the first mammal documented to have been driven to extinction by human-caused climate change. They did not know this. They knew the sand, the salt grass, the particular temperature of the water in the seasons that had always kept it alive. They knew what they needed, the way all creatures do, right up until the world stopped providing it.

No one who studies such things is certain exactly when the last one died. That uncertainty is itself a kind of grief: a creature whose end went unwitnessed, unrecorded, alone on a shrinking island in a warming sea.

The Bramble Cay melomys did not have a name in the way that other people have a name, but they existed. They were real. They carried their life forward through thousands of years of changing tides and found, at the end, that the tide had changed too fast for any living thing to follow.

We include them here because grief does not stop at the edges of the human. Because loss is loss. Because something was here, and now it is not, and that deserves to be said.

We are learning, slowly and at great cost, that we are not the only ones who die. We are not the only ones whose deaths leave a hole in the fabric of the world.

The Bramble Cay melomys are survived by the sea that swallowed their home, and by us, the ones who changed the sea, who are only now beginning to understand what that means.