I value obituaries. That may be yet another old-timey thing that’s meaningful to me but to few others. That’s ok.
Obituaries were actually the first real paid writing work I ever got. A giant annual book called Annual Obituary published by Gale Research would pay me $100 to write lengthy, reported histories of important people who died in 1993 and 1994. I wrote about Cuban musician Mario Bauza, pitcher Don Drysdale, acting guru Stella Adler, basketball coach Hank Iba, and dozens more. I remember a ton about those people more than 30 years later.
I still write a lot of obits and they sort into four categories:
- Well-known individuals whose deaths I cover in public platforms
- Unknown individuals I cover in public platforms
- Well-known individuals whose deaths I mention on my private social media
- Unknown individuals whose deaths I mention on my private social media
In all cases, some of these obits have had the longest shelf-life of anything I’ve written. I still get moving notes and comments about my remembrance of Jim Ellison, who committed suicide almost 30 years ago. It keeps his memory alive to me and clearly to others, as well. Someone like Jim or David Carr or Eric Carmen or Nikki Finke belong to that first category.
My eulogy for my mother belongs to the second category. It was one of the most difficult and cathartic things I’ve ever written. That’s how it is for anyone who memorializes a parent. I put on the front page of the New York Observer when I was that newspaper’s editor in chief. Not because I thought her life was of widespread interest. But because that was, for me, the story of the week. She was not a famous person, but her life had meaning and I wanted to share that meaning with others. Same when my uncle died – I wrote it up for the New Jersey Globe because he was a great New Jerseyan. Members of this category led a meaningful life and even notched some noteworthy moments, but not enough to generate the loving, long-form remembrance that a friend can provide. These also generate a lot of lasting readership and they’re very meaningful to me for that reason. My obits for personal friends like Tom Whalen, Paul K and Ed Ackerson belong to this category. Each of them earns multiple nice emails a year from people who knew them and search them up, in come cases not even knowing they’ve passed.
The third category is for people like Jimmy Carter or Brian Wilson or Colin Powell. They don’t need standard obituaries from me. Dozens of places will record what year they were born and the highlights of their careers. I mention their deaths only when I have a personal connection to the person that I care to share with my personal friend group on Facebook or whatever.
Then there’s the fourth category — people whose lives will vanish without mention now that there are no newspapers and they didn’t accomplish anything super noteworthy. As I wrote in my remembrance on Facebook, my cousin Joe Winkler “survived forced labor at Auschwitz and Erlenbusch, a death march to Flossenburg; and was liberated from Theresienstadt.” Then he spent 70 years in America quietly raising a family and being a nice guy. Does he deserve to disappear? My high school friend Scott Bloom reached out to me when I moved to Miami and became a nice part of my new life. Then he dropped dead. Should he just vanish without a trace? My remembrance of him on Facebook resonated with our high school classmates, many of whom hadn’t heard that he’d passed. When I make that available here on this site, his other friends or anyone searching for him can find it.
I’m going to use this site to share a few from categories three and four—stuff I’ve written to memorialize both well-known and unknown people, but only published privately. There might be historians out there who are dying to hear my Colin Powell anecdote. And I like the idea of uncelebrated people like Joe Winkler being memorialized in a way that’ll come up on Google when anyone who loved him searches his name.
