The Dead Beat by Marilyn Johnson
A book on obituaries and obituary writers may sound like a morbid joke out of The Addams Family.
It's not. Marilyn Johnson's The Dead Beat is an engaging and playful first-person celebration of what she calls the "Golden Age of the Obituary."
Most golden ages are in the past — sports, TV, airline travel— but Johnson argues convincingly that in the past two decades, "a boring, moldy old form has sprung to life," thanks to old and new media: newspapers and the Internet. As Johnson writes, "It's a great time to die."
The best obituaries aren't really about death. Johnson, who's worked as Esquire and Life and lives in Briarcliff Manor, writes that obits are "occasioned by death, and they almost always wrap up with a list of those separated from the beloved by death, but they're full of life.".
The deceased need not be famous. Many of Johnson's favorites are about people she never heard of until they died. Verne Meisner, 66, was an accordionist who, according to The New York Times, was inducted into five polka halls of fame. Five! "Who knew there was even one?" Johnson asks.
When former roller derby terror Ken Monte, 75, died, The San Francisco Chronicle used the occasion to discuss an activity "every bit as much a legitimate sport as pro wrestling." .
Obituaries fill in blanks of trivia: Carly Simon probably wrote "You're So Vain" not about James Taylor, Warren Beatty or Mick Jagger, but about the eccentric author William Donaldson, who "left her when she was still quite naïve," the British Daily Telegraph reported in his obituary.
The book is filled with lively characters, dead and alive, including those who attend the annual International Conference of Obituary Writers or surf websites such as www.blogofdeath.comcq or newsgroups such as alt.obituaries.cq .
Johnson visits London, "the obituary capital," to interview newspaper editors who fiercely compete on news of the dead. And she attends the funeral of Leon Taylor of The Philadelphia Daily News, who excelled at writing obituaries of "ordinary people who lived lives of quiet pleasure."
A good obituary, she writes, "tries to nail down quickly what it is we're losing when a particular person dies." The better the obituary, "the closer it approaches re-creation. It's the story as an act of reverence, contemplating this life that sparked and died, but also as an act of defiance, a fist waved at God or the stars. And what else, really, do we have besides the story?".