A Wiki Obituary

In a recent interview with Popmatters.com, ex-reporter Jayson Blair lamented the fact that his obit will surely lead with his fall from grace at The New York Times.

"I cannot imagine anything I could do, no matter how long I live, that will change that first line of my obituary," Blair said.

In response to this statement, Gawker.com issued a challenge to its readers: Write the first sentence Blair's obituary. The winner of the contest will receive a one-year subscription to Times Select.

George Hopkins died again Friday.

Once again, Kay Powell has come up with an opening hook to catch the attention of Atlanta Journal-Constitution readers.

You have to keep reading her July 18, 2006, obit for George Hopkins, if you want to know how he manage to die AGAIN.

Was he a peer of Dracula, an undead vampire who was finally done in by a stake through the heart? Did he have a resurrection of biblical proportions? Or did some obituary writer kill him off prematurely years ago?

No. None of the above.

Kay writes:

The first time he died, the experienced World War II hard hat diver was a law school student testing experimental diving equipment. He was resuscitated and suffered only a bout with pneumonia.

" 'Let me tell you about the time I died,' that was his big introduction," said his daughter Edith Collins of Buford. "He said it was the most peaceful experience of his life. I don't think he dived in experimental equipment again."

This time he died of complications from Alzheimer's disease at his Atlanta residence.

Be sure to read the rest of the twice-dead Hopkins' story, told by Kay, the supreme Southern storyteller.

Fred Clark's Last Laugh

My View from the Reference Desk - Occasional Musings on
the World of Obits from Tom Hobbs:

'Ole Fred Clark was a jokester, all right. So it was only fitting that he got his last laugh -- and more than the allotted 15 minutes of fame -- on July 9 when the Richmond Times-Dispatch ran his self-penned obituary. The family had to tweak it a bit, as Fred had never expected to die as the result of an automobile accident. The spirit of the man shines through though, and we are all a bit the poorer for his passing.

It's pretty clear that this 61 year old Richmond resident and Verizon retiree was a rascal at heart. He wanted us to know of his affection for "bacon, butter, cigars, and bourbon" but he was clear on this: it was the sight of his wonderful wife Alice that really lit up his world. Fred was a patriot and a godly man in his way. He didn't hold politicians in high regard, though, as he professed his amazement at "what the voters would tolerate." Sorry that he couldn't realize his final wish -- "to be run over by a beer truck on the way to the liquor store to buy booze for a double date to include his wife, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter to crash an ACLU cocktail party" -- Fred asked that you commemorate his passing by making a "sizeable purchase" of spirits to get rip roaring drunk at home "with someone you love or hope to make love to." Something else about Fred . . . he wanted you to know that "he never peed in the shower - on purpose."

In a Times-Dispatch follow up piece running on July 11, Fred's son confirmed that his Dad had tamed the rowdy ways some during his last years but would still be going out literally with a bang. Fred's remains are to be shot from a cannon later this summer at a family party.

Clearly Fred Clark's obituary struck a responsive chord all across the political spectrum. As of late July 17, his guestbook at the legacy.com online obit contained 111 pages of entries.

Way to go, Fred! (Really!)

That's this View from the Reference Desk. I hope to be with you again from time to time.

(Tom Hobbs is a Reference Librarian at the University of South Carolina Aiken.)

New published story about the 8th and other Greats

Cathy Dunphy's editors at the Toronto Star gave her so much space for "Death Becomes Us," a feature about the 8th Great Obituary Writers Conference, that she added observations and lessons from the 6th and 7th Greats.

Great job, Cathy. I especially enjoyed the stranger's comment about obit writers being poets. Nice touch.

Censoring paid obituaries/death notices.

Cathy Dunphy, writer of the Toronto Star's "Lifelines" feature, wants to know about other newspapers' policies regarding the censoring of paid obits, a.k.a. death notices.

In lieu of a request for memorial donations in a paid obit, the bereaved relatives of one deceased mom asked mourners to wage a letter-writing campaign. They were unhappy about the "uneven" health care their mom had received from professional caregivers.

They ended their prepared obituary with a request that mourners send letters to the minister of health, requesting that more funds go toward providing the elderly with safe and dignified care in their final days.

Cathy's paper wouldn't run the request line because they deemed it too political.

Cathy said: "Our paper's classified people declared that this was a political statement and that our policy forbids running it. They also said that paid death notices are officially considered as editorial material. (That was a surprise.) It ran in the Globe and Mail though, which is where I saw it.

"Do you know anything about this issue? Our ombud is looking into it and asked me if I knew what other papers' policies are.

"Thanks for anything you can do."

Please share your thoughts on this one.

USA T'other day

And, as every year, Señor McKie's cowboy hat gets all the attention in USA Today today, also featuring Marilyn reading from The Dead Beat. Sounds like another great conference. And onwards to the ninth! I wonder if Isabel and I could arrange it for Spain next time?

The 8th was Great!

Approximately 40 conferees (plus 7 spouses) shared obit-writing anecdotes, philosophies and tips during conference sessions, over enchiladas, ice cream or brewskis at various eateries and bars and sometimes in front of cameras wielded by 2 filmmaking crews (10 people in all) at the 8th Great Obituary Writers Conference held last weekend at the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas, N.M.

I won't identify all the participants here, but I will mention the presenters.

Bob Chaundy talked about assembling obituaries - complete with news, TV and film clips, previously recorded interviews with the deceased celebrity and man-on-the-street comments - for the BBC television news. Most interesting: How Bob put together an audiovisual obit for a rarely filmed scientist who discovered, identified or insert-the-correct-past-tense-verb-here DNA.

Kay Powell, the always delightful obituaries editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, talked about the history of obits for women and encouraged us to find interesting recently deceased women to write about. Mack Lundstrom (San Jose State University professor), Cathy Dunphy (Toronto Star reporter and journalism professor) and Tom Berner (retired Pennsylvania State University professor) talked about reporting suicides in obits. Spencer Michlin, who calls himself an iconoclast from Dallas, promoted family-written-and-paid-for obits that need not meet journalistic standards of truth or style.

Tim Bullamore, freelance obit writer who now sums up lives for The Daily Telegraph of London, explained how obits, similar to the New York Times' heralded "Portraits of Grief" series for folks who died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, were done for victims of terrorist attacks in London and Bali. He recommended that every newspaper have a plan for such events.

Marilyn Johnson, author of "The Dead Beat," wanted us to adopt specific terminology for the standard parts of the obituary, so we obit writers could have a common language. While we all love Marilyn and enjoyed her stories and opinions, reaction to her suggested obit lingo was mixed. Some in our number felt we should stick with common newspaper terms for story parts. Having a separate language peculiar to obits could set us back in the respect we've worked so hard and so long to gain from our newspaper colleagues, who haven't always regarded obit writing as real journalism. Some conferees pointed out that "tombstone," Marilyn's term for the phrase in which we sum up a person's life, is what some of us call details - such as birth and death dates - that show up in an obit info box. During the Q&A, the word "furniture," which Mack Lundstrom uses for the mandatory list of survivors and funeral services that bog down our storytelling efforts, was mentioned. Interestingly, Marilyn's "tombstone" and Mack's "furniture" were used repeatedly during discussions throughout the conference.

Stephen Miller, obits editor at the New York Sun and a co-author (with me - Alana Baranick - and Jim Sheeler) of "Life on the Death Beat," talked about the only obit that won a Pulitzer Prize, appropriately for "deadline" reporting, and the amazing life of that Pulitzer-winning reporter, who is still living and writing under a different name.

Jim Sheeler, our co-author and a Rocky Mountain News general assignment reporter who sometimes pens obits, won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing - but not for an obit. He was the star of the 8th Great show. As usual, we sniffled through his heartstrings-tugging stories about military personnel who died too young. Jim himself got choked up when International Association of Obituarists founder and conference diva Carolyn Gilbert inducted him into the IAO Hall of Fame.

Betty Abah, a journalist from Nigeria and an Alfred Friendly Press Fellow with Sheeler's Rocky Mountain News, gave an impassioned presentation titled "Holding the Corrupt Dead Accountable, Celebrating the Wretched of the Earth: A Case for Obit Writing in Africa."

Two other conference newcomers, neither of whom write obits but whose work involves gathering facts about people's lives, also gave presentations.

EllynAnne Geisel, whose thick North Carolina accent has not been diluted after living for decades in Pueblo, Colo., told us some interesting stories about people she learned about while working on "The Apron Book," her aptly titled book about - you guessed it - aprons.

Pam Vetter, a former TV reporter, told us about her work as a funeral celebrant. She prepares and conducts funeral services and eulogies for folks who don't want formal religious rites. She's kind of like the funeral-arranging version of a wedding planner.

Andrew McKie wrapped up the conference with a general talk about the importance of writing obits. I really liked this. I hope future conferences end with similar tie-up-the-loose-ends sessions, led by veteran obit writers, with questions and comments from the conferees.

Carolyn told us to circle June 14-16 on the 2007 calendar for the 9th Great Obituary Writers Conference, but she hasn't decided on the location. She mentioned three potential sites, but didn't identify them to us. She said she will consult with a few IAO members before making a decision.

I for one hope the 9th Great is not in Las Vegas, N.M., again. I'd like a change of scenery.

But I also hope it's not in Israel, which was mentioned last year as a possibility for 2007. If it's held overseas, I'll have to miss it. I can't afford the expense or the time for such a trip.

Please post your comments about the 8th and 9th Great Obituary Writers Conferences.

The internet and the future of death

Sadly, I couldn't make it to this year's Obituary Writers' Conference, and due to lack of internet and lack of time, I didn't even manage to get my essay sent in time to make it into the brochure (sorry Carolyn!). Did you all have fun? Did you miss me?

Anyway, due to the wonders of the interwebnet, I can post my slightly flabby piece on here for you all. It's a development of a piece I wrote not long ago about the objects we leave behind. And hopefully it might get a few people thinking.

All thoughts, replies, comments gratefully perceived.

A.



The internet and the future of death


Within three generations, people start to disappear.

A century and a half from now, there will be no-one who remembers first-hand what anyone now living was like. They will exist as faint traces from the past, appearing only randomly in whatever mementoes journalism, sheer luck and bureaucratic documents create.

What remains in your home now from 1856? Or even 1906? If you’re lucky, perhaps a pile of faded photographs, a few sticks of furniture, the detritus of heirloom – medals, coils, lace tablecloths. Personal correspondence, wrapped in string or ribbon; handwritten names inside the front covers of books; savings books, registered at long-disappeared addresses, in denominations that no longer exist.

And then there is the official, where names are inscribed and given wider context by an official seal. Public records of birth, marriage, divorce and death. Housing deeds. Wills and testaments. Changes of name. Royally bestowed honours. Formations and cessations of companies. Planning permission. Just the facts, on the record, and names there for anyone who wants to find them. It’s not our most important life moments that live on – it’s the ones that are most legally significant. And then there's the added colour of self-appointed officialdom. Those publications that, by common consent, offer their own barometers of societal participation. The OED. The Guinness Book of Records. Who's Who. Hansard. The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Wisden. Insert your own cultural equivalent here.

What does this have to do with obituaries? An awful lot, as the nature of this detritus is changing – and what it is changing to will have an enormous impact on the research methods of the next generation of obituary writers.

Firstly, we don't tend to hang onto useful objects for as long as our great-grandfathers did - increased commerce, marketing and wealth have helped our tastes to change, quickly and almost constantly. Furniture lasts perhaps ten years, not generations. The few objects that will remain from us are rarely useful as anything but emotive hand-me-downs.

Secondly, who is to say that our legacy will exist through physical objects? Think of your grandmother’s yellowing love letters, your childhood photographs – or those of your subjects, that have helped you in your research. Who now aged under 30 handwrites a letter? How often do digital photos actually get printed? (And even when they are, modern inks and papers are known to be less durable.) Where once we wrote, now we make phone calls, where meaningful words and significant moments vanish along the line and into the ether as suddenly as they are called into existence.

Will any of our correspondence, our photography, our private, tender moments be available for our grandchildren? Will emails last that long? And will they even be available to journalists of today, as passwords and computer failure keep us from accessing the finer details of their lives. As more objects, from books to photographs, become virtual, so does the quantity of data at our disposal.

If we do assume the constancy of data (groups like the internet archive are fighting to store as much as they can), then what are the consequences of this? The obituarists and, in turn, our great-grandchildren will read our blogs and our messageboard postings, see our online photo streams and watch our videocasts, as the archived caches of Google Past make it into classrooms and universities.

The concept of webpage as historical document is a sobering one. Self-promotion and overexaggeration in the online public arenas are not new phenomena, but for the first time, it is not our carefully chosen words but the wider, poorly phrased public arena that will outlast us. Finding out usernames, working out passwords, scraping antique hard drives for all but useless personal information will become a socially useful art in itself. Hackaeologists will appear as the new society’s historians.

And who will the virtual obituarists be? Online social networks are already changing the nature of friendships, of who your neighbour is and how people know each other. A familiar face around town is just as likely to be a familiar face in the online group. It can surely only be a matter of time before MySpace or LiveJournal appoints its own obituary professional, sensitive to the unique bonds that form over time in virtual public spaces, talking not to relatives but friends about their memories of people they have never met, on the other side of the globe. One obituary for meatspace, one for virtual space. I suspect that the people they will document may often appear markedly different in each.

Just as personal relationships and what we understand of as society is changing thanks to the internet, so will personal histories and obituary writing. Already, an online world called Second Life has its own embedded journalist, whose weblog is seen as the communty’s newspaper. And where there are communities and there’s a newspaper, there’s always a need for well-written, well-researched obituaries. The skills and sensibilities of their writers will be the same, but the tools markedly different.

(ends)

Fictional obit writers on film and in print

In the movie, "Closer," actor Jude Law portrays an obituary writer for a London newspaper. I was infuriated when his character told Natalie Portman's that obit writing is the Siberia of journalism.

I laughed at the opening scene of "Perfect" in which John Travolta is a fledgling reporter and reluctant obit writer. I got a kick out of his phone interview with a bereaved relative, as he asked for the name of the funeral home, the deceased's age and the cause of death. When he begged his editor to get him off obit duty and got his wish, I lost interest in the film.

Both Jeremy Piven in "Serendipity" and Jennifer Aniston in "Rumor Has It" are described as obit writers for the New York Times. Piven's character is shown as a reporter who writes obits, but I believe Aniston's character would actually be a person who takes obit info from funeral homes and families for the classified advertising department - basically, a clerk-typist, not a journalist.

Fictional obit writers usually are portrayed in movies (and in books, like Carl Hiaasen's "Basket Case" and Porter Shreve's "The Obituary Writer") as unfortunate souls who are stuck with the dirtiest job in the newsroom. The writers of these screenplays and books are using the term "obit writer" as a synonym for "loser." To them, the obit writer represents as person who is in a dead-end job, who yearns for some higher calling, who is ready for a change.

For some reporters, this may be true. To the public, this is probably the perception. But it's not always the case. Many of us regard our jobs as the best in the newsroom.

We love writing about the dead. We're not writing about death. We're writing about lives. (FYI: Many of us, who love what we do, will attend the 8th Great Obituary Writers Conference in Las Vegas, N.M., June 15-17. For details go to www.obitpage.com.)

What other movies, books, TV shows or whatever include obit-writing characters? How were they portrayed? What did you think about them?

More on military "heroes"

This one's still alive.
As I recall this was a big topic at the obituary writers' confab in 2004.
Story from Atlanta Journal Constitution

My new address is...

There's something quite stylish about this death notice.

(via Boing Boing)

Obits can get political, says Chris Reed

THE FOLLOWING COMES FROM OUR INTERNATIONAL OBIT-WRITING COLLEAGUE CHRIS REED:

Obits can get political too. See how my obit on Abe Rosenthal was used in a devastating rebuttal to the "P.T. Barnum" of neo-liberalism, the New York Times's Thomas Friedman's absurd claim that the late Abe did not influence his correspondents' political reporting.

Of the Big Three (WP, NYT, LAT), not one mentioned Ray Bonner's superb reporting from El Salvador, for which Abe cravenly humiliated and demoted him. The NYT now looks stupid for not doing so.

Lesson: Obits are political too.

ROSENTHAL LINKS:

To read Alexander Cockburn's lead piece of May 15 - which includes an excerpt from Chris Reed's story, go to www.counterpunch.org and scroll down a little

And read Chris Reed's Rosenthal obituary from The Guardian of London.

You should be able to find the New York Times' Rosenthal obituary and Friedman's Rosenthal reflections at www.nytimes.com, but you have to be a subscriber. You also could go to your library or your newspaper's electronic library.

As an alternative, read Stephen Miller's Rosenthal obit in the New York Sun.

Death online

"[W]hile few, if any, British news sources have covered the story, tens of thousands of British web users know about Anna. But the case also brings up some moral dilemmas. Should we be intruding on someone else's grief, even if we have been invited to? And in circulating the story of Anna's death, are we treating her with the same triviality we would afford to a funny forwarded email?"

Grief, sympathy and voyeurism online in today's Guardian.

Time runs out for Aussie 60 Minutes reporter

The following obit comes from our own wizard of Oz, Nigel Starck, offshore program director of the School of Communication at University of South Australia.

Richard Carleton
60 Minutes reporter, Australia
(born New South Wales 24 February 1943; died Tasmania 7 May 2006)

Richard Carleton fired off his typically hostile question, shuffled away from the media scrum at a Tasmanian mine where two men were trapped underground, collapsed, and died of heart failure. That heart had twice endured by-pass surgery; each operation was the subject of a 60 Minutes report fronted, naturally, by the patient.

Carleton, 63, brought individuality, eccentricity, and a touch of arrogance to the process of news gathering, blurring the line between journalism and entertainment, on the principle that a story is not a story if nobody sees it. In the earlier stages of his 40-year television career, he was slender and darkly sideburned, challenging Australia’s political leaders with an incisive line of questioning. He soon won a reputation as the press corps man who had the nerve to raise the offensive, the embarrassing and the infuriating probes that nobody else dared to ask.

Perhaps his most famous moment came in a 1983 encounter with the labor leader Bob Hawke, who was running for prime minister. Hawke had just beaten a decent, diligent but dull political colleague for the nomination – and then he faced Carleton, live on national television. Carleton’s first question rattled the loquacious, nail-hard Hawke. “Could I ask you,” he spat, “whether you feel a little embarrassed tonight at the blood that's on your hands?”

For 60 Minutes, he reported from all the hot spots: Kabul, Bosnia, Jerusalem, Chernobyl, Baghdad, and East Timor. The East Timor report, on an independence referendum, led to an episode – 16 years after the Hawke clash – that might have caused Carleton himself some embarrassment. He was deported by the authorities, for pestering voters at a polling station. After this forced departure, the local police found that Carleton’s hotel room was stocked with gourmet cheeses, caviar, smoked mussels, aparagus spears and quince jams. Rival reporters gleefully filed colour stories on the discovery, for Carleton was not universally loved. Indeed, he had been known to scream abuse at his own camera crews and line producers.

In later life, he became jowly in appearance and pontificating in manner. He would ask long questions in a fruity adversarial quizzing, peering over reading glasses at his interviewees. This interrogation would be spiced too by great slabs of silence, as Carleton waited for the ultimate confession. One television critic found that Carleton “looked at interviewees as if they were pieces of diseased tissue floating in formaldehyde”.

Away from television, he loved fly-fishing in the mountains. He was also an accomplished magician, travelling as far as Florida to learn new sleight-of-hand artistry at an illusionists’ convention. Richard Carleton had a son and a daughter from his first marriage, and a son from his second. He won three ‘Reporter of the Year’ awards.

Even in death, this veteran of Australian television made it to air-time as scheduled. His report, on the Tasmanian mine cave-in, was cobbled together by the production unit and broadcast on the evening of the day that he died. The 60 Minutes watch had stopped on the reporter with the piranha smile.

- Nigel Starck
(with file material from The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald)

AsiaMedia obit for Richard Carleton

Oxymoronic? Or business as usual?

Patricia Sullivan wrote an obit that ran in the Washington Post May 7, 2006, for Herbert Burkholz, a mystery novelist who briefly was a speechwriter at the Food and Drug Administration in the 1990s.

Sullivan doesn't tell readers, "Isn't it ironic, dontcha think?" She deftly presents the facts of Burkholz' life so that additional commentary isn't necessary.

She writes: Burkholz wrote 10 novels and two nonfiction books, including "The FDA Follies" (1994), an attack on the FDA in the Reagan era that grew out of a series of health-related articles he wrote for the New York Times Magazine.

After the book was published, Burkholz was hired to write speeches for David Kessler, FDA commissioner in the Clinton administration.

The titles of Burkholz' commercially successfuly mysteries and a series that included "The Sensitives" (1987), "Strange Bedfellows" (1988) and "Brain Damage" (1992) add to the weirdness of it all.

It makes you wonder where our government officials find their speechwriters and what their motives are.

Perfume obituaries

An email I received over the weekend from someone called Carolyn (not our one):

"I am looking for information on obits of people connected to the perfume industry, including perfumers (who until very recently were not visibly promoted by the oil companies). and others who were part of developing the perfume industry (like Baron Walter Langer of White Shoulder fame).

I am a retired senior exploring a subject that is dear to my heart - the history of perfumery.

I need to know where to look online and how to "ask " for it.

I know I can go to the local library and check their newpaper resources."

I could only suggest newspaper websites. Can anyone help her with more? You can email her at perfumeladi@gmail.com.

Obituary writing tips

The May 2006 edition of Quill, the Society of Professional Journalists' monthly magazine, features some tips for writing obituaries. The title is Beat Guide: Obituaries.

The chief reason I know about this is that I wrote it. Joe Skeel, Quill Magazine editor, asked me and several other reporters to share tips for covering their beats. My beat, of course, is the death beat.

I'm sure this won't help my fellow obit writers much. It's aimed at those journalists who haven't written much about the dead. And my space was limited.

I know I didn't cover everything. What other tips would you have for fledgling obituary writers?

Write after death

Robert Ballantyne, who calls himself a "popjournalist," put together a short radio documentary called "Write After Death" for CKLN in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

It's a nifty mix of comments from Cathy Dunphy of the Toronto Star, Steve Miller of the New York Sun and me (Alana Baranick of Cleveland's Plain Dealer), intermingled with theme music from HBO's "Six Feet Under" and other bits of sound, including part of John Travolta's opening scene from the movie "Perfect."

Well done, Robert!

Click the title above to get connected to the audio and, at some point, to what should be a longer written version of Ballantyne's look at obituaries and obit writers.

What a way to go!

Scott Crossfield, a legendary test pilot who pushed the boundaries of flight in supersonic planes, was killed Wednesday when the small Cessna he was piloting crashed into the pine-shrouded mountains of northeast Georgia during a storm. - from Washington Post obit, April 20, 2006.

Lawrence Grodsky, a nationally known motorcycle safety expert and author who taught thousands of riders to handle themselves on the roads, died Saturday on his bike in Fort Stockton, Texas, after being hit by a deer. He was 55, and had been on his way from a safety conference in California to Pittsburgh for his mother's 85th birthday. - from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obit, April 11, 2006.

Anthony Burger, 44, died while playing piano on a gospel music ocean cruise trip sponsored by Bill and Gloria Gaither and all their gospel music friends. Some 1,500 passengers were aboard. According to a doctor's report, Burger's heart simply burst while he was doing what he loved best, playing a gospel song before the cruise ship passengers and the other singers on the ship. - from story printed in the Leaf-Chronicle of Clarksville, Tenn., March 5, 2006. (More on Burger's life and death can be accessed online through the Christian Concert Authority news archives.)

Folks who died while doing what they loved. Let's add this to the obit writer's version of "These are a few of my favorite things."

Joe Holley and Stephanie McCrummen include little details that make the Crossfield obit take off. When Crossfield's Cessna 210, which he had been flying for years, went down, he was returning home from Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala., where he had given a talk, the pair of Washington Posties write.

They add: In a lifetime of flying, Crossfield was well acquainted with risk, having survived at least one crash landing and a catastrophic engine explosion while testing the X-15, a revolutionary rocket-powered airplane.

And the clincher, a quote from retired Marine Corps. Gen. John R. "Jack" Dailey, director of the Air and Space Museum, who noted the irony of a man who survived crash landings and explosions only to die in a small, private plane in a storm. "But if he'd been given a choice," he said, "he probably wouldn't have had it any other way. He would not have wanted it to happen on a front porch, in a rocker."

Isn't that great?

Sally Kalson filled Grodsky's obit with details and comments that add to the irony of his manner of leaving the planet.

Side note: I don't recall ever meeting Grodsky, although we attended the same high school - Gateway Senior High School, Monroeville, Pa. - at the same time. Our common scholastic heritage and the fact that Myron Cope, the radio voice of the Pittsburgh Steelers, was his uncle make me feel connected to him. Isn't it interesting how obits can have that affect on people?

Anthony Burger. I was heart-broken when I read the wire reports of Burger's death. I was a big fan.

Burger used to do this bit during a Gaither concert in which he'd play a happy instrumental piece really fast. It seemed that he was playing increasingly faster and more ferociously until, thanks to special effects, smoke poured out of the piano as though Burger had set the keys and strings on fire.

Performers at gospel concerts often sing songs about heaven and make comments about feeling exhilarated by the music and the message in the music. They say things like, "It feels like we're in heaven already," or "I can't wait to go to my heavenly home."

I hope Anthony Burger was in that frame of mind when he died. I couldn't find a report that gave the title of the song he was playing when he made his exit. It would have been nice to know.

In Praise of Jim Sheeler, Pulitzer Prize Winner

I have been in awe of Jim Sheeler's writing talents since the Third Great Obituary Writers Conference, when retired journalism professor Garrett Ray shared copies of Jim's "A Colorado Life," a freelance obit feature Jim started at the Denver Post.

It wasn't until the winter of 2003 that I was able to convince my editors at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, to allow me to try something similar. We call it "A Life Story."

This new feature was certainly better than the type of obits I had been doing, but it didn't hold a candle to Jim's work.

Last year, when the American Society of Newspaper Editors announced that its revolving category for 2005 would be obituary writing, my boss kept telling me, "You're a shoe-in for this award."

I told him he was overconfident. That he didn't realize what terrific work is being done by my obit-writing friends across the country and by many other obit writers whom I haven't had the pleasure of meeting.

And then I told him what I truly believed. "If the Rocky Mountain News submits Jim Sheeler's work in the obit category, there's absolutely no way I or anyone else can win."

I have to believe that Jim's paper must have submitted his general assignment work and not his obits. After all, he does more than walk the death beat these days.

That decision cleared the way so the rest of us would stand a chance. I got lucky and took home the ASNE honors, but I knew I didn't - and still don't - measure up to the standard of excellence the Jim sets.

A few weeks ago, we learned that Jim won the 2006 ASNE Award for nondeadline writing. And now, he's got the top prize in journalism - the Pulitzer - for feature writing.

Congratulations, Jim! Nobody deserves this honor more than you.

For those who don't know, Jim, Steve Miller (whose byline in the New York Sun is "Stephen Miller") and I are co-authors of "Life on the Death Beat: A Handbook for Obituary Writers." For more information on the book and how to order it, visit www.deathbeat.com and click he "my book" button.