The Craft of Telling Life Stories

When family and friends call The Post with a loved one's obituary, it's common to want the positive parts of a life to be emphasized.

The family of Gen. Samuel W. Koster Sr. was not happy that the headline and much of his Feb. 10 obituary dwelled on the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War in 1968. Koster commanded the troops involved, though he wasn't present during the killings.

His son, Robert Koster of Vienna, said his father "performed quite a service to his nation in three wars" and his obituary "was sensationalized and less balanced than we would have preferred."

While other aspects of his life were mentioned, such as his service as superintendent of West Point and his assignments at Fort Meade and Aberdeen Proving Ground, Patricia Sullivan, who wrote the obit, said, "That [My Lai] was the most newsworthy event in his career."

Obituaries Editor Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb said: "It's a delicate balance in dealing with people's lives. We try to be as careful as possible to portray the whole person. The family wants to put forth the best face and doesn't want to remember the painful part. But it's those painful parts that sometimes shape who the person is in the public eye."

While I understand the family's concern, obituaries are news and must meet the same standards as any journalism in The Post. The only difference is the use of honorifics (Ms., Mr., Mrs.) as a form of respect. Divorces are noted. One complainer wanted stepchildren listed only as children, but accuracy is important, and that would have been inaccurate.

Readers often confuse news obituaries and paid death notices. The Post's news obituaries are free; they are about people who lived for a substantial time in the area, or people of significant news interest around the world. They do not include funeral and burial information, which are in the paid death notices. Family members can pay to have anything tasteful and a picture -- or not -- in the paid death notices.

Good news obituaries make the dead come alive. The Post has increased space for obituaries in the past few years, and their quality has risen. They are some of my favorite reading in the paper.

Obituaries are short life stories. One of the best reads in the Sunday Post is "A Local Life," which devotes space to someone who simply led an interesting life, whether or not he or she was "important."

The obituary writers are Lamb, Sullivan, Joe Holley, Adam Bernstein, Matt Schudel and Louie Estrada. They write on deadline and compete daily with the best in the business: the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. The obituary reporters come from different backgrounds (TV writing, editorial writing, arts writing) and have to be generalists with a broad reach. Schudel specializes in culture, music and sports; Sullivan in women, the environment, science and technology; Holley in politics and sports; and Bernstein in "mavericks, unfairly forgotten eccentrics and the occasional old movie star."

Don't they get tired of writing about dead people? "Somewhat to my surprise, it's incredibly interesting and wide-ranging," Sullivan said. Schudel added, "Once we get past the first paragraph, we are re-creating a life, not writing about a death."

The obit writers, like all good reporters, don't like to take someone's distant memory for a fact. They like evidence of college degrees, honors and military service.