A 352-word reply, which is much longer than the usual responses I get. 
So, on to the issues:
1. Never apologize for the “shapeâ€ of any text. You’re the writer and the hardest work is to create.
2. Get a block of salt and put it on your desk. Sometimes, in fact, you will see 6,000 edits, all intended to improve the text for which you get full credit (periodically, touch or lick the salt block).
3. Formatting: let your editor (me) fix all of that. You create the content, and I’ll give you the form.
4. Glad you took out the reference to Diamond’s bruises. That plot line is another story.
5. I’ve never met anyone called Diamond, so Sue is perhaps a better choice.
6. I had fun with the squirrel count. Just wanted you to rethink the numbers.
7. I see your logic on the Chesterson life story. Diamond did formulate it to the extreme, which raises the question of why her life is so boring that she has to be sarcastic about people she doesn’t know. The old man has a true story and it is undoubtedly different than what she speculated from her sacred corner. She’s observing life, not living it. What would she write as her own obituary? That’s a possible replacement for the current absurd story.
8. If you scrap the current obit, save it for a later piece (i.e., never delete text forever).
9. Change Diamond’s name and write how she finally sees the futility of writing fictional obits, when the real one’s are so compelling. People live full lives and those lives end. 
10. You set a scene and then it became comical, which I don’t think was your plan.
11. I care about all of your pieces or I wouldn’t be writing so much here.
12. Thank you for your military service. I fell in the gap between the draft and the volunteer service. I would like to think I’m better as an editor than as a soldier.
Jackson