Ok I realize the title of this book could scare off some readers or make others question my reading interests, but Are They Dead Yet? written by Sam Roberts was actually an interesting and entertaining look at the history and importance of the newspaper obituary.
I have always been fascinated by the question who gets to have their obit mentioned in a major newspaper, especially the New York Times. Obituaries are a part of a person's legacy. But which people are worth remembering? When you read the obituary of a famous person, you learn not only about how they died but also how lavishly they lived.
Though it is the standard way to see if someone has passed, the obituary has become more than a death notice. It is a celebration of the person's life. It is a short biography of the person and their accomplishments during their lifetime, a way of memorializing a person. Looking at someone's life through ups and downs, with advantages or disadvantages, with opportunities or difficulties, and seeing how they applied those challenges to become their best selves.
It has long been a joke that people would get up in the morning and read the obituaries first when reading the newspaper. This gallows humor is credited to Ben Franklin who is thought to have said, "I wake up every morning at nine and grab the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up." Franklin began publishing obituaries in the Pennsylvania Gazette, which he bought in 1729. He was certain that a contemporary record of deaths would draw readers.
As a young Jewish boy growing up in Brownsville, New York, Roberts was six years old when he witnessed the hearse carrying Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's bodies from Sing Sing prison to the funeral home for their funeral. This event and the fact that his parents and many other adults in his neighborhood were survivors of the Holocaust had a major impact on the author and death haunted him throughout his childhood and even as an adult.
Over the decades, Roberts worked as a reporter, columnist, and editor at both the New York Daily News and the New York Times which has culminated in tenure now at the New York Times working as an obituarist. In this book, Are They Dead Yet?, he gives examples of many obits written over the centuries. Some are funny and some are surprising, but they are all fascinating. He also outlines the history around the world of the obituary.
Roberts writes that people want to be remembered and the public is always curious about the lives well-known people have led. In small towns, local newspaper obituaries connect one generation to the next. They provide the biographical data of an individual. Obituaries provide the family connections linking generations, sharing the birthplace, a daughter's maiden name, and married name. This will give researchers valuable tools for following family roots and genealogy.
Interestingly it is also supposed to be an honest accounting of their life. It should not sugarcoat their history or embellish any shortcomings. Though obituarists conform to the advice that "one can't defame the dead", Roberts reminds us of Volaire's saying, "to the living we owe respect, to the dead we owe the truth".
Roberts quotes Nigal Starck, author of Life After Death: The Life of the Obituary, who argues that obituaries provide a glue that bonds society not in grief but in aspirational reevaluation of our own lives. "There is nothing inherently gloomy about the newspaper obituary page", Starck writes. "Done well, it should capture life rather than wallow in death."
