I wonder if Raymond, Billy, and her daughters are in the grave because of her?

Is this real, Bil?

It sure is! The obituary is a real one. From Snopes.com:

The obituary of this 79-year-old woman ran on the 16 and 17 August 2008 in in the Vallejo [California] Times-Herald. It was placed by one of the deceased's many daughters.

According to John Bogert of the Daily Breeze (a newspaper based in the South Bay area of Los Angeles), Dolores Aguilar's daughter was moved to place the notice after reviewing the obituary of a co-worker's father and noting as she read through it how little any of it fit her mother. "What struck me was how my mother was none of the things I was reading. She was never there for us, she was never good and she left no legacy. So how could I say any of the usual things about her?" said the daughter to Bogert. She and her siblings, she maintained, were kept "unfed, poorly clothed and completely terrorized."

Before agreeing to run the unusual obituary, the Times-Herald took the unusual step of requesting a copy of the death certificate, just to ensure that what it was being asked to publish wasn't a hoax. It wasn't: the woman being memorialized had passed away on 7 August 2008.

I never really understood the name Dolores, meaning as it does in Spanish "pains" or "sorrows." Perhaps one needs to be Hispanic or Roman Catholic to appreciate the name, but it certainly does seem appropriate in this case.

More to the point, the following is part of a 2000 interview with Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the pioneer environmental activist most noted for her advocacy for the preservation of Florida's Everglades:

"We make such a fetish of the family. I think we've created a tremendous mythology about it. We believe the family must be maintained, it's the basis of society, etc. Yet for a great many of us, the family has been difficult. Many of the troubles of mankind are family troubles, more devastating and more lasting than other kinds of troubles. Almost any well-run orphanage would be better than some families I've known. There are countless unjust and narrow-minded families, and parents who bring up children in hatred for reasons that are invalid. Just being a family is not enough."

[Interview from pp. 17-22, "Women Without Children," Susan S. Lang, 1991. Ms. Douglas was 100 years old at the time.]

I've long believed that unhappy families are far more common than most people would prefer to admit. Given society as it exists, when you have GLBT people in the family mix, I'd say the chances for unhappiness are much higher than average.

Well, you know, if someone was willing to write that up, she probably deserved it.

Spanish names are very much like that; many carry a nostalgic feel, or one of Sacrifice, perhaps because of the Catholic tradition of self-sacrifice."Olvido" is another name that comes to mind. Mostly nostalgia, though. If you take to reading Spanish and Hispanic literature, you'll noticed that it is far more elegiac in feel than most British literature.

I do think the obituary's rather petty. The lady's dead; why resort to such a frivolous retort? Might as well have communicated all this to her while she was alive.

wow...there must be more here than meets the eye. for this woman's daughter to have carried her dissatisfaction, hatred and downright misanthropy this far is a testament to her own life. how miserable someone makes us should not prevent us from living a life that can be rewarding and allow us to eliminate the need for payback. clearly, this is payback for whatever misdeeds mom/grandmom/great-grandmom perpetrated.

let's hope that the misery spread to begin with stops here. let's pray that this woman, foolish enough to post such a disturbing diatribe, has no children of her own to pass along the trait.

Perhaps the obituary is a reflection of a family that refused to reach out to someone who may have been in terrible internal agony.

My heart goes out to Delores for lacking people who could accept her.

I had a grandma just like that, so I can definitely see where the family is coming from.