美国国家公共电台 NPR 'Obit' Follows The 'Times' Team Charged With Turning Lives Into History

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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

If you are the kind of reader who goes straight to the obituaries², here's something to look forward to - a documentary opens this week called "Obit." It follows the staff writers of The New York Times obituary³ desk. And to learn more about it, we went to our own obit laureate, NPR's Neda Ulaby.

NEDA ULABY, BYLINE⁴: To be clear, I don't only report obits, but I do do a lot of them for NPR. So it was easy to relate to the deadpan⁵ humor - sorry - of such obit writers as Bruce Weber and Margalit Fox in the film.

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BRUCE WEBER: Literally⁶, I show up in the morning, and I say, who's dead? And somebody puts a folder⁷ on my desk, and that's, you know - and that's what I do that day.

MARGALIT FOX: Starting the day, getting a name you've never heard of, knowing that you are going to have to have command of this person's life, work and historical significance in under seven hours - it is equal parts exhilaration and terror.

ULABY: The documentary takes viewers through the methodical steps of obit writing, starting with the awkward calls to next of kin¹.

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WEBER: Your husband's full name at birth - William P. Wilson. That's P-A-R-M-E-N-T-E-R.

ULABY: That's Bruce Weber, who left the paper after the film was shot, glasses pushed up on the bridge of his nose, as gentle and dispassionate as a doctor. Documentarian Vanessa Gould spent six days filming the five full-time⁸ obit writers of The New York Times as they did their jobs.

VANESSA GOULD: I was surprised at how grueling the work is. And the reporting process was just continually fascinating to me given how many facets⁹ it has.

ULABY: Facets polished by Times obituary editor Bill McDonald. He came to the obits desk after editing the arts pages and investigations¹⁰.

BILL MCDONALD: It's more sedentary. It's more scholarly, you might say. It's deep research.

ULABY: Once The Times obits desk was known as a dead end, so to speak, where reporters were sent to pasture or to be punished. But recently, McDonald says, obits have gained more respect. That may be partly because of the increased deaths of the big demographic slice known as the baby boomers, but, maybe, also because obits are increasingly a chance to compose something that can feel like a tiny novel.

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FOX: (Reading) In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic, battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness...

ULABY: Margalit Fox got to write a swashbuckling New York Times obit for John Fairfax, who crossed the Atlantic and Pacific in a rowboat.

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FOX: (Reading) Footloose and handsome, he was a flesh-and-blood character out of Graham Greene, with more than a dash of Hemingway and Ian Fleming shaken in. At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he laid out for the Amazon jungle. At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar.

ULABY: Obituaries serve a function larger than the bigger-than-life people who often inhabit them. New York Times editor Bill McDonald says in a culture that struggles with talking and thinking about death, obituaries are a secular¹¹ ritual.

MCDONALD: And I think a lot of people almost don't feel that the death has been fully¹² celebrated¹³, acknowledged, unless there's an obituary to go with it, as if to give that person a certain amount of immortality¹⁴.

ULABY: That explains why many of us like reading obits. Margalit Fox likes writing them, even though people often assume her job is morbid¹⁵. In the movie, she nails why it's not.

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FOX: It's counterintuitive, ironic¹⁶ even, but obits have next to nothing to do with death and, in fact, absolutely everything to do with the life.

ULABY: Newspapers, says Fox, are dedicated¹⁷ to events of the day. To find history, you usually have to read the obits.

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FOX: If you think about one of the slang ways of saying that somebody's died, we say, he's history. And what an obit actually does, which I find very compelling and very moving, is it captures that person at the precise point that he or she becomes history.

ULABY: The obit reporters of The New York Times made another point that resonated with me as an obituary writer. Every time you do an obituary, a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, you fall a little in love with the person you're writing about. Death becomes a moment of grace. Neda Ulaby, NPR News.