Death has been on my mind recently, even before I walked into my team leader’s office last Tuesday afternoon to tell her about the shocking text I had just gotten only to find she’d heard the same news and was crying while watching Dolly Parton videos on YouTube.
“Are They Dead Yet?: The Art of the Obit” has been my light nighttime reading of late. It’s by Sam Roberts, an obituaries reporter at The New York Times.
An obituary in The Times is a sign someone achieved either great or terrible — or maybe both — acclaim in life. The book is a reminder that we are all complicated.
Writing obituaries is a daunting task. There is immense pressure to get it right. Of course, a journalist always wants to get the story correct, the first time, grammatically and factually. But there is even more intense stress when you know the article will be a keepsake.
But then there is the challenge of how to assess a life. As the book has already been written on the only perfect person to have lived, the rest of us writers are left to tussle with the lives of our fellow imperfect mortals.
I had been a newspaper publisher for maybe six months in Georgia when a former chairman of the county commission died. My managing editor wrote a story which recounted what I thought to be a positive anecdote about the man: He had been taken out of a meeting by law enforcement when he stood up to his fellow board members when he opposed their attempts to whittle away at the power of his office.
Having not been there at the time this happened, it seemed to me to be a tale of courage, of standing up for what he felt was right not only for himself but the county and its citizens.
Our readers did not see it this way and they let me know in no uncertain terms, including at the church I was newly attending, which as it turned out, also was the place of worship for the late former chairman’s family. They felt we had disgraced him in death by telling the story of a difficult time — even though it was reported accurately. No one disputed the account. They just didn’t think it should be in the story.
Maybe that’s the kind of story that led to the advice of the now-defunct Boston Evening Transcript, quoted by Roberts, that readers “live that your obituarist’s guilt as a liar will be as small as possible.”
Of course, those of us who grew up in Marshall County were blessed to read the work of two of the great obituary writers in the history of newspapers, Porter Harvey and later his son Sam.
I can’t put my hands right away on my copy of the book Mr. Sam wrote about his dad, but he describes Porter Harvey’s style of writing obituaries. If you didn’t read The Advertiser-Gleam in its heyday, you really missed out. The everyman style of writing really sparkled in obituaries, where we really learned the full measure of a man, often through seemingly benign stories.
A favorite that comes to mind is the man who called his wife by a pet name, except for one time he yelled out her Christian name, to alert her that the house was on fire.
Another was the man who died during a church revival. The obituary went on to mention how many people were saved that night.
But it feels impossible to think about obituaries without considering your own, or at least it does to me. If I have an obituary one day beyond the sanitized version that comes over from the funeral home, what would it say?
I ran the idea for this column past my girlfriend and her mom the other night. I mean, yeah it might be nice to mention the people who worked for me who went on to become publishers, but is it more likely to say something like, “Boy if he didn’t like you, he sure couldn’t hide it on his face?”
Ms. Debbie was a little quick to agree on that one, and I haven’t even known her that long. I gotta check myself.
Ashley brought up that it could include how I said I was the best thing to come to their family from Alabama, even ahead of Conecuh Sausage. I’m not sure she agreed until I told her to do the math that Conecuh Sausage can give heartburn while I provide laughter, love and scratches for the dog.
But you look at Dolly Parton and the printed words of her obituary pale in comparison to the words spoken about the love she had for her fellow man and the work she did to improve the world.
Then again, her obituary was above the fold in last Wednesday’s Times — the sort of real estate usually reserved for presidents. That says a lot about the beauty of a life well lived and what all of us need to aspire to do here, and not just so people will say nice things about us after we’re gone.
What will your obituary say? What will mine? We’d all do well to consider the question and get to living like it matters.
David Clemons is an Albertville native who published newspapers in Alabama and Georgia and now works in healthcare marketing in Atlanta. His email address is [email protected].
President Jimmy Carter and first lady Rosalynn Carter greet Dolly Parton at the White House in 1979. THE CARTER CENTER
