I’m continuing the weekly exercise, intending to keep this up for 52 weeks, as I recount a wee piece of the story of my life.
This week’s prompt: What would you wish your obituary to say?
Well, this is an easy one, since I wrote my own obituary last summer. Herewith, a revisit! —
[Originally published August 1, 2023.]
Ok. Stay with me. I’m not gone, and I don’t intend to go anywhere other than this planet any time soon.
But read this. Says the author:
I had the most difficulty writing what followed: the part that describes what the person was like and how they spent their life. The reason I struggled at first was, in part, because I’m still figuring out how I want to live my life. Throughout the obituary-writing process, I repeatedly had to ask myself: “How do I want to be remembered?” “What mark do I want to leave on people’s lives?” “What brings me joy?”
And I heard a piece on NPR (I think) or else read something within the past year about writing one’s own obituary, and this has gotten stuck in my ponders (of which there are many). Please check out this from AARP and this urging toward discovering your life purpose.
So . . . this past weekend, in various parks in Manhattan, I started writing paragraphs, then stringing them together, then reordering them, then editing, and then finalizing a draft for now of my own obituary. And I’m pleased with the result, as I think it grabs the me of now and gives me some reminders of how I wish to be remembered when the time comes.
Remember, friends: I’ve been fussing about legacy and “what’s next?” for a few years now!
And this has really been a delightful exercise, not maudlin or morbid at all, one that was confirmed for me at breakfast Monday at Lincoln Square with my Webster studio alum Audrey, who, unprompted, said some of these very things that I had written the night before.
So there it is. My draft for now of my own obituary. I hope I continue to live into it for a couple more decades. Aspirations abound.
Here goes . . . .
Jeffrey Richard Carter, a professor, composer, perennial traveler, and voice teacher has [details omitted so that we don’t tempt fate].
Carter was born in New Orleans, La., and raised mostly in suburban Kansas City, Mo. His career included teacher of voice, choral director, university administrator, solo and choral singer, church organist and choirmaster, sometime actor, and music director of musical theatre productions. After taking his doctorate at the University of Kansas, he served universities in Kentucky, Indiana, and Missouri.
At Webster University in Saint Louis, Carter developed the first undergraduate music performance degree in the country that led directly to outcomes in music theatre music direction. His thirteen years as chair of that school’s music department were described by one senior colleague as “transformative — and for the better.”
The son of a Baptist campus minister, Carter also took to heart the spiritual care of his students, but with perhaps a lighter hand than his evangelical upbringing might have foretold. (His parents went to Argentina when Carter was 25 so that they could become missionaries. Richard and Marie Carter preceded him in death.)
An intensely, but not prodigiously, musical childhood and teenage years at Lee’s Summit High School led to an early realization that singing and the piano would be his life’s work. But in his university years he rebelled (mildly) and studied instead for holy orders. The path-straying lasted only a few years. Carter always said that “at 26, music found me, and never let me go.”
Carter tackled choral music composition in his mid 30s, with one early work winning an award for choral composition by Missouri composers. His choral and vocal works remain mostly self-published.
With a clear inclination toward propagating institutions, he served as a region governor for the National Association of Teachers of Singing, a national committee chair for the American Choral Directors Association, a founding board member of the Simon Carrington Chamber Singers, and also as musician and volunteer in leadership in Episcopal churches in several states.
A man who knew his desires, Carter drew the line at big pieces of cilantro, drag shows, marijuana, camping, coconut, cats, and tequila. He loved sharp pencils and high-end fountain pens. And he loved Prosecco, gin, butter, lemon posset, and chips & salsa (often his beeline at the airport as he returned from his travels), all of which contributed to his Type II diabetes which he carefully managed in the latter decades of his life. He also had a special place in his life for English cathedral music, orchestral concerts, and the musicals of Stephen Sondheim. A bit of an imp at times, Carter expressed a wry sense of humor at the oddities of life, and enjoyed the ribald with a rather teenage sense of humor.
Carter’s greatest love, aside from the Episcopal church, dogs, and gardening, was helping students find their best singing voice. In that pursuit he helped students understand – if not always cherish– language, poetry, history, art and sculpture, literature – in short, he helped students become aesthetes and embrace their humanity. Said one alumnus of his voice studio, “There was, and is, a mutual trust that was only made possible because he took the time and energy to understand the intricacies of me, as I know he did with all of his students.”
His confirmed Anglophilia was the result of natural predilection and the influence of a beloved high school teacher. His love for all things British grew deeper through his embrace of the music of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and especially Herbert Howells. Carter’s worldview was further broadened by travels throughout his life: being a summer missionary in the cornfields of northwestern Missouri, travels in Brazil as part of a Rotary International program, teaching in Shanghai as a visiting professor, exploring the suqs in Tangier, making pilgrimages to a host of English cathedrals.
Carter’s happy places were London, Vienna, New York City, or any place where his keen curiosity could find something new and unusual to explore, his Canon camera always around his neck. After leaving the USA for the first time in his mid 30s, he made up for lost time, ultimately visiting four continents and circumnavigating the globe multiple times.
Carter doted on children and his students, by his own admission filling the gaps of his childless life. One of his professed regrets was a determined focus on his career arc, to the exclusion of love and companionship aside from friends. Love never “walked right in and brought my sunniest day,” as he once said, quoting the Gershwin song in a wink at a recurring undercurrent of melancholy. The eldest of three, he leaves no immediate survivors other than his sisters and their children, and Maisie, his beloved Westie. Carter did, however, passionately believe that his legacy would always be lessons in life and song learned in his voice studio and choirs, by countless students, over his five-decade teaching career.
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