The Just in Case Obituary, 2026

At 62 I am now old enough to collect social security — though not yet eligible for Medicare, whose plan was that? I qualify for multiple senior discounts and have found myself grocery shopping on senior day. When I am surrounded by olds in the produce section, I say “Oh, right,” and show my ID at the checkout stand so I can get the ten percent discount. It’s economics, not age, that had me looking for discounts, be it on legal advice or groceries or movie tickets. But it means I’m a senior citizen, I guess?

Accepting my age has come with an internal discussion about my own mortality. Over the past few years I have had the difficult honor of shepherding a few obituaries into the world. Obituaries are other people’s version of your best self; they’re how other people think you’d want to be remembered. But unless you tell them, how do they know? They will say your wild child years are less important than your business acumen, they will mention family by name but not friends… they absolutely mean well. But what do you want?

I decided I would answer this question myself, and upon hitting this significant age, it seems time.

I hope to write 30 more of these, that my health and vitality permit to revisit this every year for years to come. This is not a goodbye note, let me be perfectly clear. It’s a “just in case” note because life includes so many things out of our control.

And if you’re of a certain age, I encourage you to do this too. Don’t leave it to other people to define what your existence looked like, what you think made you, well, you. At a difficult junction in recent years someone accused me of trying to control the narrative. Fuck yeah, I am.

Happy birthday to me.

Pam Mandel: 1964 – Still Very Much Alive

Pam Mandel was born in Santa Monica, California. She thought of herself as a textbook West Coast Gen Xer, complete with inherant distrust of The Man and a lifelong uncertainty about the future.

She studied art at San Jose State University; a modest skillset and a lot of determination allowed her to achieve minor success at every creative endeavor she chose to prioritize, be it visual arts, music, writing, or film. She had a boundless appetite for the expressive. She made big paintings, played in a ukuele rock and roll cover band, wrote a memoir and an award winning short film, and seemed to always be trying something new.

Pam moved to Seattle from the California Bay Area when her first brief marriage ended in 1993. Her move coincided with a tech boom that allowed her to earn a living in a series of jobs she repeatedly walked away from to go on adventures, be it driving the Al-Can highway or crossing the Australian Outback where she met her second husband. The two were married for nearly two decades, dividing their time between his home in rural Austria and her home in Seattle, until they divorced in 2020.

That same tech boom meant that Pam’s work as a writer corresponded with the rise of blogging and during the 2000s and 2010s, Pam was small scale internet famous for her blog, Nerd’s Eye View. Her blog provided her with some remarkable experiences — a camping safari in Kenya and Tanzania, a solo road trip through the Mississipi Delta, and crossing the Drake Passage to Antarctica — to name a few.

Her appetite for international travel waned during the pandemic; she traded long haul flights for road trips with her dog, Harley, and spent the darker months in climates sunnier than her Seattle home — Joshua Tree, Moab, and the central California coast. And she found adventures in her home kitchen with her gay boyfriend Larry, who she met her first year in Seattle; the pair had been cooking their way around the globe for several years.

While not particularly athletic, Pam preferred to ride a bike when the weather and the destination allowed. She also liked to swim laps because, she said, it “quieted the hive of bees in her brain.” You could count on her to join you at a protest march, to give time to causes she supported, and to apply her wit as a weapon when circumstances required it. Pam was impatient with bigots, lazy thinkers, and people she considered sell-outs. Pam was often accused of being elitist or stubborn, to which she would respond, “Oh, absolutely. I want the smartest people in charge, why don’t you?” Her romantic partners in particular were confounded by how she would not compromise. Later in life, she considered her solitary state the price she paid for refusing to have children, to live in places she did not want to live, or to shrink herself to fit a role she had no interest in fulfilling.

The descendent of what she called “Fiddler on the Roof” Jews, Pam had an increasingly complex relationship with her religious heritage. She declared herself an atheist, yet had Hebrew tattoos and gave time to progressive Jewish causes. She strongly identified with Jewish culture — Passover was her favorite holiday — but refused to equate Judaism with Israeli politics. Her world view was relentlessly inclusive and she thought that a life surrounded by people of all stripes was the only way to live. A great lover of carbs, she insisted that in addition to other benefits, diversity provided amazing desserts.

In lieu of flowers, she requests that you buy yourself a piece of original art for your home or, if your circumstances align, have Indian takeout delivered to your mid-range roadside hotel. And that you have dessert.