The Last Word

I like to get to all the obituaries I can in the New York Times. I even scan the paid notices, and particularly the In Memoriams. Sometimes I do skip, or "speed read" through a few if it doesn't look like there's going to be anything that interests me about the subject's work, era, or personality. This happens when it seems there's a banner day for news obituaries, when there literally might be 5 or 6 to read. I know the writer of the obituary doesn't write the headline, but when I read 'Stanley Bosworth, 83 Iconoclastic Head of Brooklyn School' I knew I was going to find the time to read about this guy.

Marilyn Johnson, in her primer on obituaries, The Dead Beat, describes code words that are used by obituary writers to dance around phrases that might not be appropriate to use when publicly writing about the deceased. With imagination, or inside knowledge, the code words, or phrases convey the blunter meaning.

Ms. Johnson offers the British way of doing this when a phrase like "gave colorful accounts of his exploits" is code for "liar."  The list can be quite an entertaining.  Read the book.  Read The Last Word as well, a compilation of obituaries from the NYT, as edited by Marvin Siegel, with a forward by Russell Baker.

There is of course a proper English definition of "iconoclast."  My own version is that it means "a-pain-in-ass."  But since Mr. Bosworth is announced to have been 83, and head of a Brooklyn school that I'll assume is, or was prestigious, I'll add "lovable" and "successful" to my "pain-in-ass" definition.

Reading the obituary, I'd have to say I was right.  He sounds like my kind of guy.  And when an obituary is good it helps when it can close with a quote from the subject, that may or may not be the words they would choose to be remembered by, but certainly in the eyes of the writer help convey a huge chunk of the subject's personality.

Consider Douglas Martin's close of Mr. Bosworth's obituary:

"But when asked if he found anything satisfying about getting older, he was unmistakably straightforward. 'I have the satisfaction of seeing people I hate die!' he said."

I'm not near 83, but I've already had that satisfaction a few times, and look forward to having it again.

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