One thing I love is seeing the geography of Swansea woven into the stories. It’s all there: Port Tennant, Sketty, Morriston, the Gower. You’ll see a name and think, “Ah, he’s a Gower boy,” or “She definitely walked her dog on Singleton Park beach.” It gives the whole city a shared map of memories, where every park bench and bus stop has a story attached.
Donald (Don) Strawbridge: Swansea Obituary & Death Notice - Swansea
There’s an irony, too, that I can’t shake. We spend our lives trying to be famous on Instagram or TikTok, but the Evening Post obituaries are the true archive. They don’t care about your follower count. They care if you were kind to your neighbour or if you had a laugh at the local pub. That’s the real metric of a life, isn’t it?
The Unwritten Rules
You start to spot the social code of the Swansea obituary. If it mentions “he will be sadly missed by his two dogs, Buster and Rex,” you know this was a person who preferred four-legged friends to humans. If it says “she was a character,” you bet your life she was the loudest one at the bingo hall. Every word is a tiny, deliberate clue.
I also wonder about the ones that don’t get written. What about the people who lived alone, quietly, without fanfare? The obituaries are acts of love from the living, but they also show a kind of social filter. We only read about the lives that someone bothered to write down. That thought is a bit sobering, isn’t it?
Barbara Demaid of Clydach, Swansea — Obituary & Death Notice - Swansea
Reading them has become a strange sort of meditation for me. It forces you to stop scrolling and just look at a stranger’s photo. You see their face, often from a time before you were born, and you ask yourself: “What was their laugh like? What was their secret sauce?” It’s a humanising exercise in a very disconnected world.
So, next time you grab the Evening Post (or scroll their site, no judgment here), don’t skip the obituaries. They aren’t a downer. They’re a window into the soul of Swansea. It’s like reading the city’s diary, and let’s be honest, it’s a lot more interesting than the letters to the editor about the potholes on the M4.
And if you see a line about someone “vanquishing a stubborn garden gnome,” please send it my way. I need to know how that story ends. Cheers.
