Books

WRITING: A new book celebrates the art of the well-written send-off

11:09 AM CST on Monday, March 13, 2006

By TOM DODGE / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

Anyone so inclined may subscribe to deathbeeper.com and be instantly notified when somebody notable dies. The author of The Dead Beat, Marilyn Johnson, tried it and says she got "tingles" seeing the announcement on the computer screen of a celebrity death. But for obituary writers and enthusiasts, all such sites pale, so to speak, when compared to the alt.obituaries newsgroup, "the obit lovers' nest." It and others may be found at www.blogofdeath.com.

One of the most active members of alt.obituaries is Amelia Rosner, "whose standing in the frontier of obituary studies is secure," Ms. Johnson writes. "Flushed with a kid's enthusiasm," Ms. Rosner announced Ronald Reagan's death to the attending members of the Sixth Great Obituary Writer's International Conference. She had been regularly returning to her hotel room to check the site.

Ms. Johnson has her own standing (nice word for an obituary writer). The former Life magazine writer has written send-offs of such luminaries as Princess Diana, Jackie Onassis, Katharine Hepburn, Bob Hope, Johnny Cash and Marlon Brando. Though the celebrity obit (in Latin, "passing") is still the prize, even more gratifying are those of the unknowns who distinguished themselves in some odd way, and the odder the better.

The woman who lived with goats, the King of Kitty Litter, the Chopped Liver Queen, the Rothschild heiress who was an expert on fleas – people quietly allaying life's ennui by chiseling out for themselves a tiny corner of distinction – are choice oysters in the soup bowl of death.

The author makes the distinction between the paid notices written by family and those penned by skilled obit writers. The latter comprise some of the best writers at newspapers and they are now receiving their due. Ms. Johnson defines their works as "stories about the living occasioned by death."

Among U.S. obit writers, she exalts Jim Nicholson of the Philadelphia Daily News and his successor Leon Taylor as tops. She daily reads obits in The New York Times, The Denver Post, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

From The Washington Post, she spotlights Joe Holley's obit of exemplary Everyman Kenneth Edell Foster. He drove madly down the wrong side of I-95 on Sept. 11 to get to the Pentagon, where he struggled for two days and nights to dig his wife's body from the rubble.

But for obit heaven, Ms. Johnson had to travel to London for its "Four Horses of the Apocalypse": The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Independent. Their writers, notably James Fergusson of The Independent, are the groundbreakers, you might say, the first to think, um, outside the box.

They began the trend toward heralding the humble. Our attraction to obituaries, she thinks, is our urge to "get into the psyche of the subject" and maybe find the key to the good life well lived. If we don't find it, we can at least enjoy this grammar and rhetoric of obituaries, this good book well written.

NPR commentator Tom Dodge lives in Midlothian.

Marilyn Johnson
(HarperCollins, $24.95)