Writing Obituaries Taught Me to Live
Years of summarizing lives showed me exactly what never makes the final paragraph.
I have written more than nine hundred endings and I can tell you the strangest thing about them: nobody has ever asked me to mention a promotion. Nine hundred lives, summarized for the record, and not one grieving family has said, "Please make sure you include that she was made regional manager in 2011."
I did not plan this career. Nobody plans this career. I took a junior desk job at a mid-sized city paper at twenty-four, intending to become a war correspondent within eighteen months, and on my third day the woman who wrote the obituaries slipped on ice outside a funeral home, which she found funnier than anyone, and the editor looked around the room and picked me because I was the only one who made eye contact.
"It's temporary," he said.
That was eleven years ago.
Here is how it works, for the curious. A funeral home or a family calls. You take down the bones: dates, schools, the war if there was one, the marriage, the children, the church or the club or the union. Then, if you are any good, you ask one more question, and this question is the entire job. I inherited it from the woman with the broken hip, who dictated it to me from her hospital bed like she was handing over state secrets.
"Ask them: what did he do that nobody asked him to do?"
And the person on the phone goes quiet... and then they stop giving you a resume and start giving you a man.
He walked the neighbor's dog for nine years after the neighbor's knees went and never once mentioned it at home. She kept a drawer of birthday cards, pre-signed, because she never trusted herself to remember in time, and she never missed. He whistled the same four notes coming up the stairs his whole life, and his daughters, both in their fifties, both said it in the same breath on the same call: the house is so quiet on the stairs.
That is what makes the final paragraph. Eleven years, nine hundred lives.
It is never the title. It is always the whistling.
Nobody has ever asked me to mention a promotion. Everybody asks me to mention the whistling.
For a long time I thought that was the whole lesson, and honestly it would have been enough. I stopped chasing the war correspondent thing somewhere around year three, not out of failure but because I had started to suspect I was already covering the biggest story there is, one column inch at a time. I read differently now too. I once found an essay arguing why safe poems lose, why the ones that risk nothing land as nothing, and I remember thinking: obituaries are the same. The safe ones, the resume ones, are the saddest documents on earth. They are proof someone died, but not proof they lived.
Then, in my seventh year, the paper gave me a new assignment, and this is where the story turns, because it turned me.
Big papers keep advance obituaries. Pre-written pieces on notable people who are still alive, so that when the moment comes, the coverage is ready within the hour. Ours had gone stale, and I was told to update the file: about forty local names. Judges, a soprano, a beloved weatherman, a woman who had run the flower market for half a century. You write these quietly. The subjects are not supposed to know.
Justice Emmanuel D'Souza found out.
I never learned how... He was eighty-one, retired from the High Court, famous for two landmark rulings and a temper that lawyers discussed the way sailors discuss weather.
He called the news desk, identified himself, and said, with terrifying courtesy, that he understood the paper kept a file on his death and he wished to read it. Legal opined that we could refuse. My editor opined that refusing an eighty-one-year-old judge nothing was a decision above his pay grade. I was sent to his house with a printout, the way you send a hostage negotiator with a phone.
He read it at his dining table in complete silence... Fourteen minutes. I counted a clock I could hear but not see. His wife brought tea and left, and I understood she had been leaving rooms at exactly the right moment for sixty years.
Then he set the pages down, took off his glasses, and said, "It's accurate."
I said thank you.
"It's accurate," he said, "and it is a CV. I have read this document a thousand times at a thousand retirements. Two rulings and a list of committees." He tapped the last page. "Young man, is this really what I amount to? Because if it is, I have wasted my time, and if it isn't, you have wasted yours."
I should have apologized and left. Instead, because his question was better than my draft, I asked him mine. The inherited one. What have you done that nobody asked you to do?
The silence that followed was different from the reading silence... Longer. And then Justice D'Souza, terror of the second bench, said quietly, "I don't know. I did what the office required, and I did it well, and the office required a great deal." He looked at the pages. "You have written the obituary I earned. I had hoped for the one I wanted."
What happened next took three years and I still don't entirely believe it.
He asked if he could revise. Not the text: the life.
He said it exactly like that, like an edit. And he did. He was not sentimental about it; he approached it as case preparation.
He tracked down a man he had sentenced harshly in 1979 under a law he had later helped strike down, and wrote to him, and got a reply, and kept the reply in his breast pocket the day he told me about it. He learned to make his wife's tea instead of receiving it, at eighty-two, burning himself twice, delighted both times.
He wrote, of all things, poems. Bad ones, he insisted, though I read a few and "bad" was not the word; "unguarded" was. He worked at them like judgments, and when I mentioned there were places built for exactly this, he grumbled and then let me show him the pages on forgiveness and memory, and read them the way he read precedent, muttering, dissenting, occasionally persuaded.
Every few months he would call the desk and say, "Update the file," and hang up.
He died on a Tuesday in monsoon season, at home, tea in reach. The obituary ran at nine hundred words. The two rulings are in paragraph two, where they belong, because they mattered.
But the final paragraph is a man of eighty-four standing in the flower market at 6 a.m. with the woman from my advance file list, learning the names of lilies, because he had read in his own obituary that he had no hobbies and found the evidence insufficient.
His wife called me after it ran. She said, "He kept your first draft in his desk. He wrote across the top of it." She read me the note, and I pulled the car over to write it down, because eleven years of endings had finally produced my instructions for the middle.
"Objection sustained," he had written. "Returned for revision."
I keep my own file now. One page, updated every birthday: the obituary I have currently earned. I read it once a year, the whole terrifying CV of it, and then I go looking for the things nobody asked me to do.
The stairs need whistling. That part is on me.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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