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.
