My Sunday morning routine is usually the same. I’m up early, between 4:30 and 5 a.m., often aided by at least one cat and his/her well-practiced wake-up call. We usually have Sunday breakfast out, either at the Elks Club in Waikiki, or the local favorite, Koa Pancake House in Kaimuki, which gives Meda an excuse to sleep in for another couple of hours.

Meanwhile, I do a quick email check, delete the 50+ appeals for campaign money that have arrived since Saturday evening, freshen the cats’ water, then step outside to grab the Sunday paper.

After a quick scan of the front page, where I note any stories that I’ll come back to later, I turn to my first read of the day, found at the end of the Star-Advertiser’s Local news section.

The Dead Pages. More politely, the obituaries.

These didn’t used to be my first landing pages on Sunday or any other day of the week. I guess it’s a product of hitting that certain age where, more often than not, I usually recognize at least one name appearing here. Someone I knew, or one of their relatives. One of my own relatives, or relatives of old family friends whose names I recognize only from memories of stories my parents would tell. Public figures who became known through good deeds or bad. People you never knew but who rubbed shoulders at some point with directly or indirectly.

Right now, perusing the Dead Pages gives me a vague sense of relief, since I’m still here reading about those who are not. Later, as I learned from my mother’s adjustments to an advanced age, each loss becomes more personal until, at some point, recognizing one of the newly deceased becomes an infrequent occurrence.

By the time my mom turned a sprightly 95, she frequently complained about being left alone.

“All my old friends are gone,” she would quietly complain, obviously wishing she could turn back the clock and share more good times, or good memories, with them.

About six years ago, I described one of the things my mother left behind when she died (“History by obituary“).

I opened another box of family things this week, as I try to slowly reduce the several generations of possessions that I boxed up after the deaths of my parents and my sister on the assumption that I would “deal with them” later.

This time I pulled out what appeared to be an old photo album. It turned out to be filled with newspaper clippings carefully placed on plastic-covered pages. On closer inspection, the clips are mostly from the obituary pages. Carefully cut out, most dated, and sorted into categories.

They led me on a strangely emotional journey past signposts in my mother’s life.

This computer age has made me lazy. I used to clip significant obituaries, but saving them didn’t prove useful when I couldn’t locate where they had been saved. Now when I recognize someone on these Sunday pages, I read the details of their lives, take a few minutes to place their lives alongside the memories of my own, and have the luxury of thinking that it isn’t necessary to save a clipping because, well, they’ll be archived online and readily available.

Of course, that’s just a useful fiction, of course, since I’m unlikely to remember the passing shadows of past lives without some additional memory aids that, in the absence of paper clippings, are now unfortunately absent.