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For most of my 20 years as the obituaries editor of The New York Times — a tour that ended recently with my retirement — a certain New Yorker cartoon, enlarged and pasted on plastic foam, was displayed in the vicinity of my desk. It never failed to amuse me.
The scene in the cartoon, by Paul Noth, is a cocktail party. A woman holding a glass of wine is standing beside a stoop-shouldered old fellow bearing a sour, pinched expression. She is introducing him to a man holding a drink. The caption reads:
“Mr. Stephenson is the subject of a widely anticipated obituary.”
Morbid humor, to be sure, but the cartoon struck home because it captured how an obituary, particularly a Times obituary, is widely viewed — as conferring on its recipient a high distinction, like a trophy or a lifetime achievement award, even if the recipient never gets a chance to read it.
That is not to say that Times obits are meant as tributes; they’re a particular kind of journalism, striving to present a full and honest account of a life, blemishes and all. Still, knowing how selective we necessarily have to be about whose deaths we’ll cover, readers, it’s clear, view a Times obit as a resounding public affirmation that a person’s life, in whatever sphere it was lived — whether in the halls of Congress, on a baseball field or in a laboratory — in some way shaped society at large. And that such a person’s death is, consequently, judged newsworthy.
I was reminded of that simple truth every day by an endless tide of emails that I and my fellow obituary editors would receive from people asking us to consider a loved one, a friend, an associate for an obit. Sometimes we’d be deluged by an organized lobbying campaign waged by, say, a dozen or more colleagues of the deceased.
Perhaps an even more telling, and in some ways more moving, indication of how coveted a Times obit can be was the occasional unsolicited appeal I’d receive. It was usually by postmarked mail from someone asking that he or she be remembered in our pages when the time came. These mailings might include their résumés, brief autobiographies, photos, testimonials and accolades they’d received. Some people of high rank would have their offices or publicists send in material.
Many of these correspondents thought we might want to prepare their obituaries in advance, knowing that The Times makes a practice of doing just that for hundreds of the most prominent people still alive. Of the roughly 24,000 obituaries I ushered into print, about 4,000 had been what we call advances, pieces written beforehand and left to wait their turn, until fate called. About 2,500 remain in the tank today, and fresh ones continue to be added.
I held on to these mailings, stashing them in a folder and writing down the names on the cover — a scribbled table of contents.
“At 71 years of age, I have more yesterdays than tomorrows,” one woman, a top obstetrician and author, wrote. A man of some stature in the perfume industry recalled his “interesting life” in enclosing a self-composed obituary, adding, “Please put this in your records and hopefully when I pass, someone at The New York Times will miraculously come upon this gem and it will see print.”
Among others were a historian of genocide, a Long Island psychiatrist, a former television network president, a classical music composer, a former Times reporter (“I recognize that it’s somewhat presumptuous of me to assume that The Times will take note of my passing”), a brother of a first lady.
No doubt there was an element of ego in these pitches. But they also spoke to a more universal impulse, I think. People want to be remembered for being more than a name on a headstone. If they can’t live forever, then at least their stories might, in an obituary, a tangible form of an afterlife. An obit may be a last shot at immortality, as frail as that vehicle may be: a yellowing newspaper clipping or, more lastingly now, a lonely URL address surviving in the vastness of the internet, just a click away.
I never heard from most of my correspondents again, and in looking over their submissions recently, I discovered, through web searches, that a good number of them had died. Would we have written their obituaries had we known of their deaths? In most cases, I’m afraid, probably not. Accomplished people though they were, most would not, to their disappointment, have cleared the “newsworthy” bar.
Some submissions, however, did come in handy when we chose to write their obituaries. And at least two of those obits remain on file, as “advances.” As someone who made a living remembering the dead, I’m heartened to know that the subjects of those pieces remain with us, that their stories haven’t ended just quite yet.
And, I’m happy to say, my retirement notwithstanding, neither has mine.
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