Of course I love it when an obituary is the subject of a blog post! Most of the obituaries I read are still formulaic. Every once in a while, you get one that reflects the complexities that make us human. This is one of them.
Every once in a while an obituary is itself an intriguing and engaging essay, as shown here, posted to Facebook today by Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. Notice the voice, the intimate detail, the surprise, the attitude. Presumably Nick wrote this, though it was not attributed:
JONATHAN ROBINSON FLYNN 1929—2013
JONATHAN ROBINSON FLYNN, the self-proclaimed “greatest writer America has yet produced,” died on a Sunday morning at the end of October in Boston. At the time of his death he was living at Roscommon, the nursing home where he’d spent his last five years of his life.
He was the subject of his son Nick Flynn’s 2004 memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which chronicled his father’s life as an absent father, a bank robber, and as a federal prisoner, as well as the five years he lived as what we now…
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If You Have Five Seconds to Spare 