It’s all about the obit

Nobody learns to write obituaries anymore, because newspapers generally don’t run them anymore.

Oh, there are death notices submitted by the funeral home to inform the community of an impending service, or remembrances submitted by the deceased’s loved ones, but they are treated like advertisements rather than news stories. Both are usually handled by the same department responsible for classified ads, and may even require a fee to be printed, depending on the publication.

It’s tough to sum up a life in 300 words or less, making sure to hit the highlights like place of birth, marriage, employment, names of survivors and, for some, the obligatory paean to a deity of your choice. The process can be a very early step on the road to dealing with the overwhelming grief of an untimely passing, or the beginning of the tidying up after the inevitable end to a rich and full excursion on this earth.

If a family death notice is a curriculum vitae of the deceased’s accomplishments, an editorial obituary is a mini-biography of his or her life. It’s a compelling story that may contain all the same facts but takes a point of view that tries to convey what the person was all about.

When written by the least-senior member of the editorial staff, about someone the poor newbie has never met based on interviews with the family and research in the archives, an obituary can be the tiniest feature story you’ve ever read. In fact, that’s why we used to do it that way, to teach young reporters to recognize the salient facts that would make the story interesting, while still writing to fit the allotted space.

When written by a professional obituary writer employed to cover the passing of Historically Important People, or a critic or reporter who has followed someone’s high-profile career, the obituary can morph into an appreciation, a history lesson, or a cultural analysis. The New York Times’ “Portraits of Grief,” full obituaries on everyone killed on Sept. 11, 2001, still stands as the high-water mark of the art of the obit.

When written from the heart, the obituary becomes all of this and more: a eulogy in print that touches us all, whether we had ever heard of the deceased or not. This is one of those, written by and, unfortunately, for some of my first friends in Denver.

For Sandy and her family.

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This just in: Why are death notices important at all, you ask?

When Parade magazine has 32 million copies featuring Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto on the cover printed before her shocking assassination on Dec. 27, and can’t afford to make any changes before it is distributed nationwide the following weekend (although her death was mentioned on the Web site), it should be common sense for the publishers to give the 400 newspapers that insert the print version the heads-up. That same common sense would dictate the newspapers acknowledge the disconnect somewhere in their pages, and many did.

Not so the twice-weekly Fort Collins “Get off my driveway” Now, which made perusing Saturday’s edition just a bit surreal, especially since Bhutto was a bold-face name in the Headlines column.

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