Honest Obituaries

Several months ago there was an obituary placed in a local newspaper citing the death of one Marianne Johnson-Reddick. However, it wasn’t your typical 'she was the greatest gal in the world' obit, but a litany of complaints about the abuse her children had to endure while the deceased was still alive. When she died, her son sang 'ding dong the wicked witch is dead.' I think it’s a good idea, honest obituaries, and lovely to see an end to phony praise-filled obituaries followed by maudlin eulogies to people who were rotten eggs from the get-go. So with all that said, here’s Marianne Johnson-Reddick’s obit, as written by her son Patrick and co-written by his sister Katherine.



‘Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick
January 4, 1935 - Aug. 30, 2013

Marianne Theresa John­son-Reddick born Jan 4, 1935 and died alone on Sept. 30, 2013. She is sur­vived by her 6 of 8 children whom she spent her lifetime torturing in every way pos­sible. While she neglected and abused her small chil­dren, she refused to allow anyone else to care or show compassion towards them. When they became adults she stalked and tortured anyone they dared to love. Everyone she met, adult or child was tortured by her cruelty and exposure to violence, criminal activity, vulgarity, and hatred of the gentle or kind human spirit.


On behalf of her children whom she so abrasively ex­posed to her evil and vio­lent life, we celebrate her passing from this earth and hope she lives in the after­life reliving each gesture of violence, cruelty, and shame that she delivered on her children. Her surviv­ing children will now live the rest of their lives with the peace of knowing their nightmare finally has some form of closure.
Most of us have found peace in helping those who have been exposed to child abuse and hope this message of her final passing can re­vive our message that abus­ing children is unforgiv­able, shameless, and should not be tolerated in a “hu­mane society”. Our greatest wish now, is to stimulate a national movement that mandates a purposeful and dedicated war against child abuse in the United States of America.’



I have sometimes wondered about the eulogy one of my siblings may have read about my mother when she passed on. I was not at her funeral, nor did I want to go. Perhaps they didn’t write one, but I’m sure someone stood up and true to the ritual of funeral, spoke of her virtue and loving nature. I thought I might correct that.

My mother wasn’t the criminal,vulgar, dirt-bag that Marianne Johnson-Reddick obviously was, and she didn't knock us about and stuff us in a cold bath, but she was still a selfish, narcissistic hag who complained ad nausea about her husband, her children, her deprived circumstances, her ruined opportunities, trampling out joy at every opportunity with her grumblings and heavy sighs and ruining every Christmas with her whiny cries of - What  about me?               

Israeli Army - Brown Shirts

I once read a memorable quote by Carl Jung that said ‘you become the object of your hatred,’ and in the case of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, this maxim would appear to be apropos.

An analogy of this quote is the little boy who grows up in a violent home and is a witness to his mother being beaten by his father. The little boy grows up hating his father and vowing never to be like him. He eventually gets married but then one day, in a pique of anger, he beats his new wife. And then he beats her again. Not having understood the harm which occurred in his psychological make-up as a result of his childhood memories, he partakes in the same negative behavior as his father, thereby becoming just like him and replicating his behavior. The little boy has become the object of his hatred – his father.

We all know about the slaughter during the Second World War – the concentration camps, the ovens, the gassings, the gunning down of innocent people into mass graves by the German army. Events like this should never be forgotten. However, the Israelis now seem to be suffering from some kind of memory loss, and collectively don’t recognize that their hatred for the events of the past has now been transferred to a Palestinian population held hostage in an ever-shrinking land mass. The West Bank and the security fence that surrounds it has already been likened to the Warsaw ghetto – a horrifying place, where the use of dogs was a familiar tactic of the German army to terrorize and control the Jewish population during the occupation of Poland. Jews were not allowed to work, and they were starved, beaten, humiliated and killed. This same treatment is now being inflicted on the Palestinian people.

The Israeli army has been using attack dogs to ward off the threat of terrorists infiltrating the country, but many innocent Palestinians are now being bitten and terrorized by beasts, so vicious in some cases, the military have to use stun guns to pull them off their victims. The army argues that ‘the use of dogs limits bodily injuries and obviates the use of other measures.’ However, Palestinian laborers who illegally cross into Israel, refute these claims. Several of them have been bitten and required hospitalization. Sarit Michaeli, from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, says that ‘the Israeli military knows full well that the vast majority of people who enter are laborers and not terrorists. If they indeed are terrorists, they should arrest them and question them and bring them to trial rather than set dogs on them, which is completely unacceptable.’

For the Palestinians who run the risk of getting attacked and bitten by these dogs, they have no choice, because they have no other way of making an income to support their families. ‘This is my livelihood,’ says Qaeud, a Palestinian laborer. ‘I don’t have a job here and the Israelis do not give us work permits. I don’t have any other source of income, so as the sole breadwinner of the family, what else can I do?’