By Bart Barnes
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, January 2, 2005; Page C01

You have to love humor and irony, pathos and mystery, tragedy and romance. You have to be reverent and irreverent. You have to laugh a little or you'll go crazy.

I know. For 20 years I wrote obituaries at The Washington Post, at least 15,000 by the time I retired in March.

I loved that work. It taught me that even in the monotony of the daily grind, life could be funny and beautiful, surprising and strange. Death is no big deal if you don't love life. I only wish I could have met more of the people I wrote about.

When death is up close, people often try to tiptoe around it. They may speak in hushed voices. They have an acute sense of fragility. They may look for ways to lighten up. More than once, a man or woman phoning in the obituary of a spouse answered with a lusty, "My pleasure!" when I thanked them for calling. I'm sure they didn't really mean it . . . or maybe they did.

There can be a certain quirkiness in the conversation of the bereaved and a poignancy in their sense of what's important in a life. I once spoke with a widow whose salient memory of her recently deceased husband was that at the age of 6 months, he had taken second prize in a cute-baby contest in southern Indiana. As an adult, this man was an influential Washington lawyer, a partner in a prominent firm and chairman of several important bar association committees. But his widow could not stop talking about what a cute baby he had been. Somehow, in her mind, that made him more human. I think she was right.

There were five of us on The Post's obit desk, and we were always looking for the offbeat, the unusual and the bizarre. Obituaries were a rich lode to mine. We once ran a short wire service obit of a Nazi war criminal who had been condemned to death in Poland after World War II. He was spared execution on the grounds of ill health. Can a man be too sick to die? This man clearly wasn't. He lived 40 more years and died a natural death in his nineties in a Polish prison.

We were not unmindful that grief and sorrow were the hallmarks of the obituary craft, but we still had to keep up our spirits, and there were times when it was necessary for us to laugh. We developed our own brand of gallows humor that helped us stay sane, or at least less insane than we otherwise might have been. We loved bad puns. When an accountant or statistician died, his "number was up." Innkeepers and hotel workers "checked out." We joked about "the 'fun' in funeral." Miss Manners probably wouldn't have approved. But we kept this banter among ourselves. We could not leave the office with a heavy heart each night and show up the next morning enthusiastic about our work. Writing obituaries, we discovered, could be fun, if our hearts were light. "Death is the occasion, but obituaries are about life," J.Y. Smith, the founder of The Post's obit bureau, reminded us. How right he was.

On that day in 1989 when the news wires reported the death of Salvador Dali, our editor, Richard Pearson, read it, grinned and declared, "Goodbye, Dali!" in a tone and manner that recalled the old Broadway show tune he was mimicking. Pearson was not being disrespectful. Had he been given to benedictions -- which he was not -- this would have been his own benediction on the life of the Spanish surrealist painter. But it was simply his way of telling us to get Dali's obituary -- written years in advance -- out of the "intype" file of prepared obits and ready for publication in the next day's paper.

Pearson died of pancreatic cancer on a dark night in November 2003 at the age of 54, and tears were shed in the obit bureau. But we all had some good laughs telling stories about him at a memorial observance a month later, and that only reinforced my conviction that humor is an effective and healthy palliative for grief and an antidepressant for those of us in the death business. Even the most dour of mortuary workers, those of the omnipresent "I-feel-your-pain" public faces, had their lighthearted moments. In the cheeriest of voices they'd say, "We got him!" or "Yep, she's here!" when we called to verify a death, which we did before publishing an obituary.

It was longstanding Post policy to include the cause of death in our obituaries, and we kept a mental tab of the more unusual ways in which people died. We once published the obituary of a psychiatrist who drowned in a sensory deprivation tank. We had a man who perished in a midair hang-gliding collision and a retired ambassador who died in an in-line skating accident. It was a sad and tragic death, but we all thought it was a class act that the former diplomat was Rollerblading at the age of 79.

We wrote the obligatory obituaries of world leaders and celebrities. But mainly we wrote about ordinary people, the rank-and-file bureaucrats and businessmen, doctors, nurses, teachers, letter carriers, plumbers, taxi drivers, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, most of whom had never had their name in a newspaper. They were the people who kept the social machinery running. Without them, there would be no civilization. I liked to call them the real people. They deserved an obituary in The Washington Post. There were gems and treasures among them, and real heroes who survived hell-on-earth experiences, recovered and returned to society, wanting no more than the love of family and friends and the chance to make a quiet contribution.

Helga Stein and G. Bowdoin Craighill Jr. were among my favorites. Stein was a Jew who remained in her native Germany throughout the Hitler era and its anti-Semitic persecutions. During the last year of World War II, Stein lived by her wits on the streets of Berlin, sleeping in bombed-out buildings, scrounging and scavenging for food and keeping one step ahead of the Nazis as the Holocaust continued apace. For the last 11 years of her life, she was an unofficial neighborhood "granny" in the Hillandale community in suburban Maryland. She told stories at Girl Scout meetings and recreation centers about what it was like to be a Jew in the Nazi capital, and she led children's classes in quilting and making clay figurine sculptures. She died at 75 in 2002.

Craighill was a Washington lawyer. During World War II, he was a naval officer and served aboard the antiaircraft cruiser USS Atlanta when the ship was sunk in waters off Guadalcanal in November 1942. He received the Silver Star for gallantry under fire when his ship underwent heavy Japanese bombardment. "The dead were simply piled up. Body parts were thrown overboard . . . the deck was aslant, slippery with blood and oil," he would recall 60 years later. After the war, Craighill went back to his law practice in Washington and specialized in trusts and estates. He canoed and played paddle tennis, and he tossed boomerangs, which always came back. He was an amateur ballet dancer. He once danced the part of an animated cherry tree in a ballet titled "The Cherry Tree Carol." He died at 88 in 2002.

There were thousands of others, such men as Marcus Bles, a Missouri farmer who arrived in the Washington area in 1939 with $50 in his pocket and a sixth-grade education. Bles was a self-styled "good old boy" who liked hound dogs, Stetson hats and string ties. He raised cattle, and he bought land, including hundreds of acres around a rural Northern Virginia intersection known as Tysons Corner. He was worth an estimated $50 million when he died at 81 in 1986.

In 2003, we ran an obituary of Stephen N. Jones, 82, a Rockville physician who must have been one of the last doctors in the Washington area to have made house calls a regular part of his practice. His record was 51 in a single day. We wrote about a Foreign Service officer named Christopher P. English, whose avocation was commercial airline travel. On long weekends, he'd book passage on a round-trip flight to Asia or around the world, just for the fun of flying. Rarely did he leave the airport once his plane landed. He just got the next flight out. He was said to have logged more than a million miles of air travel. English died at 48 in 2000.

If there were an obituary "love is patient" award, mine would go to Ruth Hull Bennett, who put off marriage for two decades while she pursued a professional career. Bennett died at the age of 101 in 1998. As a college student in Iowa, she'd accepted a classmate's marriage proposal. But then she went off to medical school, became a physician and founded a Quaker hospital in India that she directed for several years. When she returned to the United States, her old beau, miraculously, was waiting. They married, and for the next 25 years she was a wheat farmer's wife in Colorado. She moved to Sandy Spring in 1979 and at 90 won a gold medal in her age group in the 1,500-meter race-walk in the Maryland Senior Olympics.

I'll not forget Alan Marks, a Washington stockbroker who learned he had terminal cancer in 1997. Marks planned his memorial service. But he hated the idea of missing it, so he held it before he died. He called it a "celebration of life" and invited 500 people. It was held Feb. 16, 1998, at the University of Maryland chapel. Marks died less than three weeks later, on March 6. "Please smile about my life. It was a full and good one," he said in a statement read at his grave. He was 59.

I would love to have met Eloise Randolph Page, a stereotypical steel magnolia. She was white-gloved and proper, a quintessential lady of Old Virginia who traced her ancestry to Colonial times; a former Sunday school teacher and chief of the flower committee and Altar Guild at Christ Episcopal Church in Georgetown, where she demanded perfection in the ironing of altar linens. In her professional identity, Page was a top clandestine operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. She was known as the "Iron Butterfly." She was the CIA's first woman station chief, and her station was Athens, where terrorists had assassinated a predecessor. The CIA did not want us to say where Page had served, but it was hard to see how this would have harmed national security. Half the people at her church knew. A CIA friend told me the agency's problem: "We deny we have a station in Athens," he said.

Those who write obituaries learn the truth of the old proverb that "success has many fathers while failure is an orphan." For years, it seemed, we were always writing about scientists who had played key roles in the development of the atomic bomb, which helped the United States win World War II. We must have written a dozen obituaries of men and women who helped create modern computer technology. When Carlton R. Sickles (D), a former Maryland congressman and longtime Metro board member, died in January 2004, he was widely eulogized as a "father" of the Washington area Metrorail system. At least two other men also claimed to have been the "father" of Metro.

We rarely were asked to write about the fatherhood of projects, ideas and ventures that ended badly. We wrote about the NASA scientists who worked on the Apollo and other successful space missions but little or nothing about those who worked on the Challenger, which exploded in January 1986, killing all seven crew members. We ran few, if any, obituaries of the automotive engineers who participated in the creation of Ford's disastrous Edsel.

In our dealings with families and friends of the departed -- the primary sources of information in most of our obituaries -- we tried to tread carefully. Most of them were having bad days, and many were prone to exaggerated notions of how very good the person who died really was. Often they could remember only what they wanted to remember. Sometimes they remembered things that never happened. They were bound to be disappointed in the obituaries we produced.

Ex-wives were among the few exceptions to this truth. They tended to be realistic about their former husbands. They did not expect us to write the obituary of a saint. In fact, they did not want us to. One of the more unusual complaints of my obituary-writing career came from an ex-wife who said I had failed to describe how bad her ex-husband really was. His second wife, however, loved the obituary I wrote. She sent me flowers. A colleague suggested I send them along to the first wife, but it seemed this would only rub salt into her wounds.

Many ex-wives wanted to be left out of their former husbands' obituaries, but this we could not do. We reasoned that an obituary should be a summary of the principal events in a life, and a marriage is a principal event. This explanation appeared to satisfy most of the ex-wives with whom I spoke but not all. I remember one woman who was especially apprehensive.

"What are you going to say?" she asked.

"We'll say his marriage to you ended in divorce," I said.

She was relieved. "I only want everyone to know I divorced him," she said.

Depending on families and friends for our obituary information, we were not always sure we were getting the full story. There were times when we could not tell whether relevant, but embarrassing, facts were being left out. But there also were times when it was obvious that something was missing.

One obituary in particular stands out. It was of a man whose résumé included an Ivy League college degree, service in the Marine Corps and the CIA and a stint as an executive with an advertising agency. For the last 15 years of his career, he was a letter carrier. Something clearly was missing from that picture. The man also was an alcoholic whose addiction had cost him his white-collar career. But in the end, he defeated his alcoholism. He quit drinking, joined Alcoholics Anonymous and died a sober man. We included this in the obituary, and it made it a much better story.

In any story about a life, the subject is one of the best sources of information, but in obituaries, that person usually was unavailable. Occasionally we did interview public figures whose obituaries we were preparing in advance. Two men I spoke with about their obituaries were Clark M. Clifford, the former secretary of defense and quintessential Washington insider; and S. Dillon Ripley II, the longtime secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Clifford, in particular, was talkative. He said he was delighted to be able to contribute firsthand to his obituary. Unfortunately for him, he would have much preferred the one I prepared immediately after our interview to the one that was published. He was 79 when we met in his law office in downtown Washington in 1986 to discuss his obituary, which as initially written described him as a trusted confidant and counselor to presidents, and a wise and able helmsman to anyone needing help in navigating the corridors of power in Washington.

But Clifford lived 12 more years and in that period became embroiled in a banking scandal related to the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Charges of fraud, conspiracy and bribe-taking eventually were set aside on grounds of his old age and failing health, but they nevertheless figured prominently in his obituary when he died at 91 in October 1998.

Ripley was amused at the thought of discussing his obituary. I had written him a note asking for a meeting and he wrote back, signing his reply "the late Dillon Ripley." We spent a pleasant afternoon talking about his love of ornithology; his explorations and travels to remote parts of the world; and his years as chief of the Smithsonian Institution, which he liked to call "the nation's attic." He died at 87 in 2001.

It was traditional at The Post to include in obituaries memberships and associations of the person who had died. These ranged from religious to social and fraternal. There were such professional groups as the Alexander Graham Bell chapter of the Telephone Pioneers of America, to which it seemed every C&P Telephone Co. retiree belonged. We often wondered what telephone pioneers did when they got together. We had similar questions about Mensa, the club for the super-intelligent. Did they play three-dimensional chess? One member told me they mainly talked about how smart they were.

Some of these groups had exotic-sounding names -- Ancient Arabic Order, Nobles of the Mystic Shrine comes to mind. But listing these memberships was mostly routine work, and often it was boring. Still, we had to be careful. Mistakes were embarrassing at best and often hurtful. Several years ago, a colleague, intending to describe someone as having been a member of the Clans of Scotland, wrote instead that he was a member of the Klans of Scotland, apparently thinking subconsciously of the white-hooded "invisible empire" that terrorized blacks, civil rights workers and others in the American South. Fortunately, an alert copy editor spotted the gaffe and corrected it before it got in the paper.

Would that obituary writers were always that fortunate. I once misattributed the authorship of a short story written by W. Somerset Maugham to Henry James, and I heard about it for months. A colleague once got the date and location wrong for the sinking of a Japanese battleship during World War II, and we were inundated with demands for a correction, which we ran in the next day's paper. At least the corrections kept us humble, or they should have. The good news was that they also told us our stories were being read.

Somebody cared about every single obituary we wrote.