“Do we mock the dead by staying alive, by reading their names in lists, by remembering them in the world, by speculating about those we never knew?” the novelist William Saroyan once asked. “Do we perhaps take pleasure from our own survival and even from their sad or joyous failure to do so? Bet your life we do.”
Roz Chast’s classic New Yorker caricature satirizes an obituary page whose headlines identify the deceased not by name, but by their age compared to the reader: “Twelve Years Older Than You,” “Three Years Your Junior,” “Your Age on the DOT.”
I’ve been an obituary writer for The New York Times for the past 10 years. I’ve buried—if that’s the right word—some 1,500 individuals during that time. And I’ve just written a book titled Are They Dead Yet? The Art of the Obit. The book opens with Saroyan’s quote and with Chast’s perspicacious cartoon. But it wasn’t until this year, when I turned 79, that I seriously began to contemplate my own mortality.
Mourning didn’t become me as a child; I was raised in a family where the reflexive response to death was denial. So I wasn’t pleased when, as I entered my eighth decade of life, I was asked to veer professionally from an urban affairs correspondent to an obituary writer. The Times writes advance obituaries for well-known people of advanced age, and the backlog of unwritten obits of the not-yet-departed had gotten quite long. I was drafted to help close the gap.