Here is Sam Roberts’s Are They Dead Yet? The Art of the Obit. Roberts, a 50-year veteran of newspaper journalism, is an obituary writer. The Art of the Obit does a deep dive into his working process. Look, the fact that you are dead is the least interesting thing about your obituary—at the very least, it’s the lede you don’t bury. The other four column inches (if you’re lucky) are a pithy distillation of your life. What’s worth writing about? Is it the embarrassing stuff that you’ve been trying to put behind you for decades? Is it the one shining moment you had forty years ago with a quick gloss over the last four decades where you didn’t amount to much? Did you die in a hilarious manner? Did you launch an Internet meme?
Here’s a fact you might not know. Roberts has over 2,000 obituaries already written. Because when you die, folks want to know about your death (and life) RIGHT NOW, and Roberts can’t be spending a week doing research. But, at the same time, the obituary he prepped last year might be out of date if you keep hanging around longer than expected.
It sounds like a full-time job, honestly. Fortunately, we have folks like Sam Roberts who know how to encapsulate a life with a healthy balance of earnestness, humor, and pathos. Weirdly uplifting.
–A Good Book, Sumner, WA
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