Sometimes I write obituaries.
Not recreationally. It’s a side hustle, for a magazine I used to work for full-time. Based on what they pay me now for about a weekend of work every other month, I got a big raise when I quit.
The gig is actually writing the “people news” department for a professional organization’s membership magazine. It also includes whenever a member gets a new job or wins some local award for exceptional localing, but the obits are rapidly becoming the biggest part of it. There’s just not much reason to announce that you got a new job in a magazine that’s published every other month. Some people are traditionalists, I guess, but there are better ways to spread information in a world of email and Facebook and texting and actually seeing other people.
Still, people news has been a part of the magazine for decades, and there’s an audience for the comfort of consistency.
The obituaries themselves don’t provide much comfort. Five hundred words divided among twenty dead people doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for the fact that the deceased loved cats. Plus, they all loved cats, and that kind of redundancy can kill the flow I work so hard to create. You have to keep the pace up or you’ll lose your readers. The dead get a date and cause of death, an overview of their career, and a significant achievement or two if any exist. Anyone who wants more can find the late person’s Patreon.
The brevity of these death nuggets has gotten complaints from math-challenged grievers certain their loved ones deserved a full-length feature, if not the front cover. I deny them only partly out of heartlessness. There’s also the practicality of cold, hard experience. The magazine gave in to these complaints once, and elevated a dozen of the year’s dearly departed to a special “Leaders We Lost” feature at the end of the year. We got so many angry letters about that one, including one from a woman incensed we hadn’t included her father, even though he a) wasn’t a leader in any way, even at a buffet and b) wasn’t dead.
If there’s one thing more draining than complainers, it’s murder victims. It’s always terrible to see a life snuffed out prematurely like that, and it’s almost impossible to find relevant information about them. It’s not appropriate to go into prurient details about the methods or the motives, and none of the published reports about the murders ever focus on anything but. It’s enough to drive you to a farm upstate.
Nonagenarians are a different kind of annoying. The magazine’s policy of inclusiveness may seem heartwarming, but it raises some problems. Nobody remembers people who retired twenty years ago, and the places they worked have usually changed names or given up the ghost entirely, so I have to waste space explaining details that don’t matter to readers who don’t care.
I do have a favorite obituary, though: a woman who was killed by a pack of wild dogs. I invested a lot of effort to check out that one. Most people don’t get killed by packs of wild dogs these days, and some readers like to send fake news items in hopes that the magazine would publish them so everyone could have a good laugh about how stupid we are a few months down the line. But this one checked out. It was in rural Georgia, but newspapers covered it all the way to New York.
Sadly, when I wrote the obituary, I could only say it was caused by “an animal attack.” I only had five hundred words, and a veritable army of ninety-year-olds had died that month. But while I couldn’t share the full story of how she came to push up daisies, I’ll always remember her, and isn’t that the point of an obituary?
