39.

I know a man named Nowell Briscoe. He lives in Atlanta. He is an elegant old-style Southerner, well-mannered and evocative of sonorous August longings and Harper Lee. He’s also a total hoot, ritualistically sipping mint-tinctured gin-and-tonics (G and T’s, as he calls them) while waxing lyrically over the sublimities of vampire movies and Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte. For the past fifty years he’s been collecting obituaries.

Nowell’s archive, contained in more than thirty thick plastic binders, includes national newspaper eulogies of celebrities he admires, major Hollywood stars like Bette Davis, for instance, but also such lesser lights as Richard Todd, who played the preacher in A Man Called Peter. He also preserves death notices of interesting strangers he has come across—a beloved teacher who reminds him of his own high school history instructor, or a man so eccentric that he sported a walrus mustache and pince-nez glasses in 2009. He also has in his files obituaries of people from his hometown, Monroe, just outside Atlanta. Most important, the collection holds the three obits most precious to Nowell, the first three he cut from a newspaper and pasted into a book: those of his grandfather, grandmother, and aunt Ruby.

When Nowell was seven, his grandfather died. This was the boy’s first encounter with death, and he was confused and sad. His dad called him up to the big leather easy chair in the den and read to him the obituary, which focused on his grandfather’s benevolent influence on friends and acquaintances. The young Nowell immediately felt better. The ugliness of dying and death’s finality, terrible as they were, had produced a gentle tribute to his family’s beloved relative, a description of what was best in his life. In the words, his grandfather came richly alive: cogent, glistening, eternal. The boy had never loved the man more.

Nowell had a similar experience when his grandmother died soon after, and then, three years later, at the passing of his aunt Ruby, a town librarian who had introduced him to the lovely world of books.

Ruby—generous and smart, gifted in wit, with movie-star good looks in the black-and-white photographs that grace Nowell’s walls—saved the boy from a lonely childhood. Too tall for his age, physically awkward, the young Nowell didn’t fit in well with his classmates. Ruby noticed this, and invited him, when he was ten, into her realm: volume after colorful volume, all containing universes in which a sorrowful and solitary youth could find lovely domains. As Nowell told me, Ruby was his true mentor and muse, and so her death, from a heart attack brought on by diabetes and kidney disease, almost destroyed him. Her obituary, which he pasted in an elegant green leather scrapbook she had given him, is a thing of beauty, a memorial in which his aunt still breathes, cracks wise, and guides.

Especially sensitive to grief, to its pains but also its affectionate disclosures and comforting memories, Nowell grew up to become a mortician. He chose this vocation, he confessed, because he wanted to help people when they were most in need. He also cherished the power of mortuary art, able, like an obituary, to transform a corpse, often disfigured, into a form comely and unforgettable.

He’s retired now from this work, and calls himself the archivist of death. But he is full of life, galvanized by reminiscing and keen on what has not yet passed—True Blood and brisk cocktails and good conversation and also good books, lots of them, such as Allan Garganus’s Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, one of his favorites. He has turned the underworld into his paradise: rot into rose.