MARILYN JOHNSON

How did I end up, once again, wending my way to Las Vegas, New Mexico? Two plane trips and that long ride from Albuquerque through the desert gave me time to marvel again at Carolyn Gilbert’s power to declare a gathering place for obituary lovers and actually get us to show up. The writer from Bath flew to Chicago and took the train down. The obituarists from London arrived disoriented, and hours out of synch. The film crews, the reporter from USA Today, Canadians and Californians, Oregonians and Virginians, Ohioans and New Yorkers, and strays from all over assembled for the Eighth Great Obituary Writers’ Conference to share the news of the dead.

Jim Sheeler, thirty-eight now, but without the boyish qualities that had appeared in his face a year earlier, drove down from Denver, and stood in front of us, looking tired, wiped out; he told his story quietly, and everyone gathered in the brick-lined room sat hushed. In the course of immersing himself in his subjects’ lives, he had met Major Steve Beck, a Marine whose job was to make casualty calls. “Once I get to the porch, I stand there and take a deep breath,” Beck told Sheeler. “There’s no option. There’s no fork in the road . . . I pick myself up, gather my thoughts and ring the bell. . . . The curtains pull away. They come to the door. And they know. They always know.” Beck, it seemed, was a little like Sheeler: he took a job that many people found distasteful, and embraced it, and he stayed with the families long after he’d fulfilled his obligations.

Sheeler and photographer Todd Heisler followed Major Beck for nine months. Embedded in “Final Salute” are appreciations of the three Marines whose deaths in Iraq had been announced by Beck: Jim Cathey, Kyle Burns, and Joe Welke. The story about them ran 12,000 words in the Rocky Mountain News and won Pulitzer Prizes for both feature writing and photography.

So Sheeler stood in front of his proud elders in the obituary world, and told us how, sitting in a limousine clutching the hand of a pregnant twenty-three-year-old widow, he first met Beck, who was about to escort her to her husband’s casket. Access that seemed extraordinary to us was just Jim, asking the people who lined the path toward someone’s grave how they did their jobs. Take, for instance, the rifle guard, the men who present military honors at graveside, firing blank cartridges in salute. They wear white gloves. One, Sheeler noticed, had holes in the thumb and fingers of his. Why was that? We’ve been doing so many of these, he was told, after a while, the seams of the glove just pop. Here, you want this? And in New Mexico, Jim Sheeler pulled out of his pants pocket the worn-out glove he’d been given after another military funeral.

Is the war in Iraq happening in a part of the world you don’t understand, in a section of the newspaper you skip, on a channel you flip past? It comes home in his story, archived in the Rocky Mountain News.

Sheeler brought a young Nigerian journalist to the conference, Betty Abah, who had just spent six months at that paper on an Alfred Friendly Fellowship. Abah paid attention when her new colleagues won Pulitzers, and it gave her ideas. Obituaries in Nigeria spoke no ill of the dead, but perhaps they should. Perhaps obituaries could call to account the despots who ran rampant in Africa. She presented a paper that laid out her plan.

I’ll propose that we, in the tradition of theEconomist, The Times and other papers of international repute, write the obits of our leaders in advance. And even go to this mischievous extent: ask them for their inputs and clarifications as we write and rewrite their obits while they still walk the earth.

Mischief in the face of tyranny! The obit writers loved that. Abah said she also wants to write obituaries of some of the victims of the scourges of Africa, particularly HIV/AIDS and genocide. “If you look closely, you will see stars dimming, disappearing abruptly, tragically. If we as journalists can’t do anything, we can at least do obits.”

And Tim Bullamore, who had worked with The Times after both the Bali bombings in 2002 and the London bombings in 2005, showed us what he had learned about producing clusters of obits for victims. The hardest part of these Portraits of Grief-style remembrances wasn’t getting all that information, or writing about an ordinary life in an interesting way; the hardest part was keeping the victims organized, he said. He walked us through his filing system, coding M for missing, C for confirmed dead, or F for filed, to be altered as the victim’s status changed. You will need this someday, he said,
chillingly.

I looked around the room, at faces new to me, like Moira Dann, who helps craft the personal stories readers send in to The Globe and Mail, and Joe Simnacher of the Dallas Morning News. (From his obit of Jim Moore, a spy: “Every day he would come home, and we’d say, ‘How was your day?’ and he’d say, ‘Fine,’” his daughter recalled. “We’d say, ‘What happened?’ and he’d say, ‘I can’t tell you, or I’d have to kill you.’”) Trudi Hahn was among those missing at the conference this year. While reporting a story on Vietnam vets for the Star-Tribune, the fifty-something obit writer had fallen in love with an eighty-seven-year-old former Air Force fighter pilot. She left the paper, where she’d spent her working life, married him and moved to Texas. That wasn’t the wildest story: Heather Lende survived being run over by a truck that crushed her pelvis; she’s recovering, still writing obits for the Chilkat Valley News in Alaska.

It had been a year of change in a profession that changes every day. Chuck Strum left his job as obits editor of the New York Times to become associate managing editor on the night desk. Some of my favorite bylines in the world of obits had retired, Myrna Oliver at the Los Angeles Times, Tom Long at the Boston Globe, and Betty Barnacle at the San Jose Mercury News; Yvonne Latty took a buyout from the Philadelphia Daily News. Now John F. Morrison writes the obits for the Daily News in his spare time, though he’s primarily an editor and a rewrite man. When will a full-time obit writer be hired at the paper that changed American obituaries? That’ll never happen again, I was told. The Inquirer and the Daily News had been sold; the San Jose Mercury News had been sold; good obituary pages hung in the balance. The obit world held its breath.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal entered the obituary field with a flourish when it launched “a weekly column that notes the passing of people who have left an imprint on the world of business.” Written by the moonlighting Stephen Miller, the column honors innovators like Govindappa Venkataswamy, whose eye care centers in India were “the McDonald’s of cataract surgery,” and John Ventre, “He Left His Mark on Sauces, Salsa.”

The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, the Advocate in Baton Rouge, and the Sun Herald in southern Mississippi responded to the chaos and destruction of Hurricane Katrina the way any good paper responds now to disasters with death tolls: they published obituaries of the dead that were full of vivid detail and the voices of the victims. “She didn’t want to be run off by any storm,” Mary Ann Trentecosta’s daughter remembered. She said, “Baby, I don’t even like to drive to Baton Rouge and that’s only an hour and a half.” Many of these stories were posted on alt.obits.

And the Guardian launched a section called “Other Lives,” which gave it the flexibility to pay tribute to such sketchy characters as Val Widdowson, a “usually jobless, sometimes homeless” actor who had a tendency to disappear just before he debuted in a major role. “Garrulous in company” but “reclusive in his home life,” Widdowson, dead for weeks, had been discovered by a gas inspector. But the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe recalled seeing him peel an orange alone onstage for five minutes, “one of the most fascinating stretches of acting I have ever witnessed.”

One night we pushed the tables in the bar together, and kept squeezing in chairs. Andrew McKie, wearing a cowboy hat, held court; Bob Chaundy from the BBC popped up in a fake cowboy hat; Amelia Rosner, from alt.obits; and a clutch of eminent retired journalists and professors elbowed in past the locals in boots and tattoos. The great Hispanic sculptor, Luis Jimenez, had died in New Mexico just before we arrived, crushed by one of his sculptures, but no other scintillating deaths occurred on our watch this year. We made do with forty-eight obituaries of women from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, each more sparkling than the next, that Kay Powell had passed around to prove there were great women subjects, if only we’d look: women who shot rifles and smoked corncob pipes, who challenged a ban on married women teachers in Georgia, and one who “brought a lot of warmth to her role as a high priestess and witch queen.” We were still laughing over Holly Crenshaw’s obit of Colette Miller, who couldn’t stand working for the IRS. “When they finally blew up the building where she had worked, she said she was only sorry she never got to do it herself.” Drink a toast to all of them; remember them all.

Among the hundreds of obits I’d saved in the past year were two quiet remembrances, neither of which I brought to share at the conference. One was the self-penned obit of a friend’s brother, discovered after he killed himself. “He left many things well begun,” he’d written, a line that still stops my heart. The other was the obit for Marie D. Nicholson, written by her son, Jim, in the sparest of prose, without quotes or description, only mentioning her job “at the old Quartermaster on Oregon Avenue” during World War II and noting that “in years past when her sons were young she had been active in Cub Scouts.” The copy Jim sent me ends with #30, the journalist’s sign-off.

The vivid obit is a triumph, not to be taken for granted; and sometimes it’s impossible to write.