Don't bury your life in just the facts

The New Yorker is my favorite magazine, although it is not as good as it used to be. I'm not either, so I understand. Age gives us experience but it's tough on the legs.

The New Yorker recently ran an article on obituary writers, who, for grieving families, are the most important people on a newspaper but, for years, they had the status of least important. Reporters are entrusted with news events, but obituary writers are entrusted with lives.

Amy Rabideau Silvers does remarkable work for the Journal Sentinel and I want her to write my obituary. But not soon. I'm sure she'll do a much better job than I did when an editor ordered me to write my own obituary.

In a memo to the staff of the Milwaukee Sentinel, dated Jan. 30, 1970, a very tough editor I loved dearly wrote, "Will you please each write your own obituary to be put in the city desk files. While this is a rare opportunity to change the facts of life, we trust that you will be accurate."

If you'd been ordered to write your own obituary, you'd probably have had the same problem I had: I couldn't decide whether to begin it by saying, "The sweetest, nicest person who ever lived died yesterday," or be more modest and just say "the nicest."

When 23 of us didn't write our obituaries, the editor sent a second memo dated March 11, 1970, and explained sensitively why he needed our obituaries - he was worried that our deaths would mean more work for him:

"The problems in getting the essential facts of a person's life under the pressure of deadline can be offset by advanced preparation. If you prefer not to write it yourself, ask a friend to interview you. And if you have no friends," he said in his usual sympathetic way, he would assign a reporter to the job.

Editors, like puppies without social graces, have to be trained properly by reporters and this puppy never could be. He went where he wanted. And he could shake our dandruff with his bark.

I recall a new reporter who quit his job a half-hour after he started when the editor gave him his first assignment, which was to write his own obituary. However, some reporters had a good time saying goodbye to themselves.

One wrote, "At the time of this writing, her only noteworthy achievements were in winning the Associated Press photo contest for Indiana news reporters and a father who spray-painted a dead tree in his backyard bright red."

Most staff members wrote that they died peaceably of old age, but I recall one reporter had himself being garroted, another was shot and the environmental reporter wrote that he drowned in a septic tank "collecting information for another series on pollution." He also applauded himself for being known "throughout the state for his grasp of sewage."

One of our arrogant critics - readers know that this description is a job requirement - wanted to make perfectly clear in his obituary that "he didn't belong to the Masons, Knights of Columbus, Moose, Elks, Rotary or YMCA."

An extremely quiet, unpretentious copy editor who had come out of rough and tumble journalism in Detroit, Mich., wrote that an editor named Charlie once told him, "You're nothing in this business until you've been fired three times."

The copy editor admitted being fired once and coming close a couple of times, but wrote sadly that "I never lived up to the potential Charlie saw in me."

I'm a pack rat so I've kept a lot of things no one else would be interested in - our babies' first dozen teeth, a whole envelope of them; and my captain of cadets badge, the highest title I've earned, when I was in fifth grade and in charge of safety cadets who worked the corners at 27th Street Elementary School. And my wife has kept a cocktail napkin from a Minneapolis bar where she had her first drink, when she was underage.

But who am I to berate her for keeping dumb stuff when I've kept 32-year-old copies of obituaries of people who are still alive?

A wonderful guy, an assistant editor who helped me when I first joined the Sentinel, was distinctively unlike several tyrannical editors who screamed at reporters and threatened to eat their children and pets. This assistant was gentle, sensitive, concerned.

He had joined the Sentinel when he was 18 and never attended college, yet became an excellent journalist. I respected him because of what he'd achieved through hard work.

However, the obituary he wrote about himself had a horrible error. He said he was going to live to be 100. But he died only a couple of years after he wrote it.

Humor and insight...

An important and risky job... Most news stories are birdcage liners tomorrow... but obituaries are kept, tucked away in books and become part of the family history.

I can still remember writing the obituary for my mother, following the form that was used in others I had seen, and choosing words very carefully.

Obits in my local paper are free, and thus subject to editing. I was mortified to see the printed obituary changed so much that it scarcely resembled what I submitted. Not only was it edited, but it was now factually incorrect in ways that would only matter to my family. Silly things that changed meaning.

I called and talked to the writer that changed it and let her know exactly how wrong her product felt, and how furious I was. She was young, and said, "well, obituaries are not your own column, they are news stories, and I can change them, it's my job." She got a lesson in the pain she can cause when she is editing people's lives, and deaths, and changing things around just so she could feel like a real reporter.

< /rant >

I remember having to write my own obit too, for a high school class... Things haven't exactly turned out like I predicted then, have they?

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