The Obits Annual 2012

When you're a media company as large and influential as the New York Times, you can set the standard. You lead, not follow.  There are fiscal years, calendar years, and NYT years.

Take one of their latest publications, "The Obits Annual 2012." It landed wrapped under our Christmas tree with my name on it. I unwrapped it.

Since we haven't yet crossed the divide into 2012, no one has yet passed away in what will be the new year.  Yet the Times uses 'Annual 2012' in their title for a book that contains selected obituaries that appeared in their newspaper from July 2011 back to August 2010. Thus, the Times "obituary year" is August 2010 through July 2011.

No problem really, once you absorb the ground rules. They do present a year, 12 months, and provide a controlled substance for obituary addicts like myself and others. They are providing a drug and a service.

The book is a fairly hefty paperback, arranged by months and trumpeted by some literary celebrity blurb, one of which is so forceful it makes its way onto the cover, above the title. There is a foreward by Pete Hamill, which might be seen as bad news for some of Mr. Hamill's enemies, since his foreward is not being published posthumously. He's not included as an obituary entry. The NYT obituary editor, William McDonald contributes an introduction.

Mr. Hamill leads off as sonorously as he talks: "The cause of death, or course, is always life." My own thoughts run that life, however short, is what always precedes death, and obituaries are about that life. Mr. McDonald gives us the numbers, and the nuts and bolts of the business of delivering the stories of the selected deceased. Neither of these sections are so long that you are tempted to skip them. They are good setups to what follows. Lots of reprinted obituaries, arranged chronologically, with pictures. Not bad at all.

Before I even saw the book, I longed for something like it. There have been compilations before, but it's the inclusion of the photos that add life to stories about someone's passing. I will forever remember when I read Robert McG. Thomas Jr's. 1998 obituary of Charles McCartney, 'The Goat Man,' whose obituary was accompanied by a picture of Mr. McCartney in front of the school bus he had lived in at one point, the day it appeared in the paper.

Reading obituaries was nothing new for me, and reading them in the Times was also nothing new, but reading that one that day, I got so excited I felt I had to tell others there was something they should read. I at least shared the joy with the guy who sat next to me at work. I can't say he became a convert, but he did enjoy what he read.

Robert McG. Thomas is no longer with us, himself getting a nice sendoff in January 2000. But nothing ended there. A lot more passings, and a lot more well-written, witty, ironic, informative pieces by very capable writers await us in the Annual 2012 edition.

Even if we haven't put the new calendar up yet.

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