Obit Vault

It's the last day of the year. A chance to add one more posting to my count for the year, making the total 106, a tie with last year's total.

Anyone who reads the tribute obits in the NYT knows that the obit editor, William McDonald, will write a year-end recap of the lives that were lived and passed away in 2023. It's always a neatly worded elegy, picking out the highlights of the well known, and not so well known who have passed away. Would you remember the name of Joe the Plumber if not for a NYT obit? Bill reminds us.

This year's recap picks up the theme of the very long lives of some of the notables who passed away. Many are over 100; a lot between 90 and 100.

Interesting in Bill's piece, he uses an out quote from one of his former obit writers Margalit Fox. She's the only obit writer quoted in his piece. Margalit was the closest writer to the now long departed, but always missed, Robert McG. Thomas Jr. She could capture in a lede an entire life.

Margalit has left the paper to write books, but I know the obit writers on slow days are given ne assignment of updating advance obits that are in the "morgue," or starting new advance obits on the famous who might be near the grave. You know President Jimmy Carter's obit keeps getting updated, but has yet to makes its way out of the morgue as he will, and all of us, eventually head into it.

In one of my October Vermont visits I would always stop by the Northshire bookstore in Manchester and buy a Warren Kimble calendar for the coming new year. When I presented the calendar to the cashier, the older owner of the bookstore, I asked, "how high do the numbers go?" As I'm now found of saying: How bad can the year have been if you're alive at the end of it?

He didn't immediately understand the question, but then took in the calendar's year, maybe 2016, and understood. I'm more than a little surprised that I've made this far into the 21st century, being born just before the half century mark of the 20th. 

And anyone who reads NYT obits as regularly as myself knows that when a Robert McFadden obit appears the subject will probably be a nonagenarian, or older. McFadden himself is a Pulitzer winning reporter whose ledes are pure poetry.

I think he's still active with the paper, being somewhere in his 70s. Anything by McFadden is a delight to read, and Bill's recap for 2023 made me ask: "how many McFadden obits are in the vault waiting to rise to a day's edition?"

Even when eventually Mr. McFadden passes away here might still be a few left in the vault. When the subject passes away after the obit writer, Marilyn Johnson who wrote the valentine to obits, "The Dead  Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries," would tell us these are called "double downs" by the pros.

When this happens, the editor usually adds a note to the obit that so-and-so passed away before the subject, lest someone start to think the writer has risen from the dead.

Obit writers might pass away, but they never leave us.

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