What Do You Want Your Obituary to Say?
Do you ever read Times obituaries or look through the annual "Lives They Lived" issue of The Times Magazine? Recently, there have been obituaries about a female spy in World War II, the man whose name inspired the rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd and the inventor of the Club antitheft device. If The Times were to write your obituary someday, what would you want it to say?
In a 2008 edition of Talk to the Newsroom, Bruce Weber, an obituary writer, answered questions from readers. Here are some excerpts that might help you shape your answer:
Q. Occasionally an obit is really funny, reflecting, I suppose, the life that's been lived. How much leeway do you have in reporting some of the wackier aspects of a person's life?
A. The general outlook of the obituary department is that our articles are about lives that have been lived, not deaths that have occurred. The idea is to appreciate the character of the subject to the degree that that's possible, usually based on what we know that person has accomplished and on what we can glean from interviews with family members and others. You never want to make fun of anyone, but you do want to appreciate eccentricities, record unusual events and relay humorous incidents or comments. In that way, a good obituary can be like a good eulogy.
Q. How do you choose [whom to write about]?
A. … Sometimes the details of a person's life may not add up to "important," but they add up to interesting. Case in point: The typewriter man, Martin Tytell, whose vocation was so eccentric and he was so good at it that the details of his craft and life were reader candy.
Students: Given that The Times writes obituaries only about people who are important or interesting for some reason, what would you like a Times obit about you to say? For example, you might try writing just a single paragraph of an obituary that might appear when you're 98 years old. What would it say about your life and accomplishments?
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