When I began exploring the dead beat, I’d take a train into New York City and visit the main and mid-Manhattan branches of the public library to browse obits around the world. There I discovered, among others, the obits of the Boston Globe, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Guardian, and the Globe and Mail. Reading any of these papers, I felt as if I’d been transported to cities of substance and consequence, where people weren’t hurried offstage after death but given generous farewells. It took a week or more for The Times of London and the Guardian to cross the Atlantic and for the Australian papers to make it around the world, days at least for the American papers; they were already history. But I loved to sit in the public library’s great reading room, filling out old-fashioned requisition cards with a stubby pencil, then watching a librarian pull newsprint from stacks on the shelves, just like librarians of previous centuries.
By 2005, these papers and most others had easy-to-use websites; the entire archives of the New York Times had been scanned and were available online; and I could read The Times of London, and any other paper, in fact, the minute an editor posted it. I visit the reading room of the library now only for nostalgic purposes, or to study the physical layout of the pages with photographs. My computer has replaced the library, its big colorful flat screen cluttered with vivid icons, my desk swept free of messy clippings. The browser icon bounces when it needs attention; bells and whistles help me navigate the shoals of the Web. Most days, I don’t use my legs, or the rest of my body, either—it’s just my eyes and fingers, flashing impulses to my brain as fast as I can type, as fast as the screen can jump. Whenever my connection falters, I go mad.
Between the “Hi Marilyn Any Pills You Want” and the “word of the day,” (“verjuice,” the sour juice of unripe fruit, or acidity of disposition) was the email I’d been waiting for from Celebrity Death Beeper: “A celebrity death!” I’d signed up for the free service at deathbeeper.com to be instantly notified when someone famous died. The webmasters claimed to check the news blogs every ten minutes. I imagined getting a little shock when someone passed on, much as the children in It’s a Wonderful Life heard a bell ring when someone got angel wings. I did get a tingle seeing “A celebrity death!” spelled out in my inbox. That jaunty exclamation point said, We’re in the exciting business of passing along big, bad celebrity news. That sounded good. I wanted to be wired to the current that courses through a newsroom or ripples through the airwaves and cyberspace when someone famous died. I needed to know as soon as it happened, the minute it happened.
How deflating, then, when I discovered what celebrity deathbeeper.com considered a celebrity: Lygia Pape, seventy-five, “a multimedia artist and founding member of Brazil’s vanguard Neoconcrete movement.” May the survivors of Lygia Pape forgive me, but I’d been oversold. Could the deathbeeper have found a less celebrated celebrity? Is there a movement in any field, particularly an artistic one, with a more unfortunate name than “Neoconcrete?” Such a pedestrian beginning to my job monitoring the goings of this world! Beep me, I’d begged them. You want to be beeped? they said. We’ll beep you!
I had a brief, self-loathing whirl with the Web sites whosaliveandwhosdead.com and casketsonparade.com. I visited the deathclock, which calculated I had twenty-eight years to live (and where do I complain if I don’t?). Some hours into one black hole of a day, I tumbled into findagrave.com (“Jim created the Find A Grave website in 1995 because he could not find an existing site that catered to his hobby of visiting the graves of famous people. He found that there are many thousands of folks around the world who share his interests”). This is not it, this is not it at all. I was wasting my time with graves and the celebrities who filled them. I didn’t want the literal macabre; I wanted the metaphoric macabre. I wanted a central location where I could mingle with other obit fans, read obits, and not get stalked by creeps.
How do obituary fans find each other? By logging onto the public bulletin board known as Usenet. No matter how particular or weird our obsession, we can find like minds on Usenet. I go to google.com, click on groups, type in the phrase alt.obituaries. “Description: Notices of dead folks,” it reads at the top. We have found the obit lovers’ nest. It doesn’t take long to figure out the basics of the alt.obituaries newsgroup. Down the page runs a list of the most recent posts—obituaries, mainly, but also political diatribes, jokes and health watches, alerts on hospitalizations that could bode imminent death. The subject headings read like obituary headlines: “Betty Jean Vallareale, Vegas dancer,” or “James Nelson, killer who became a minister,” or “Deuce, the Two-Faced Kitten”; or news headlines such as: “Veronica Lake’s ashes found in antiques store.” Reminiscences about friends and loved ones who have died appear next to accounts of the deaths of presidents. Prominent deaths appeared moments after being announced in the media. It’s possible to watch an obituary develop—reading that someone has turned ninety, for instance, then seeing a notice of his hospitalization, a press release of his death, a wire-service obit, then a flurry of send-offs from various papers. The “official” obituaries are dissected, disputed, filled out; stories that couldn’t be told are told. (“Almost everyone in Pittsburgh who loves baseball…loved Bob Prince,” Bill Schenley, one of the core posters, wrote of a Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster. “Unless, of course, they actually knew him. He was a miserable, mean-spirited drunk.”)
Visitors to alt.obituaries might have to wade through some noise from the Libertarian or the guy still raving about Darwin to get to the good stuff, but it’s worth it. This is the mother lode of obituaries, with public postings that anyone can read; and anyone who fills out a registration can post. The pace isn’t the rapid conversation of instant messaging, but a stop-motion dance that feeds a steady infusion of records to a mysterious and seemingly bottomless library flickering out there in cyberspace. Its archive stretches back to late 1993, when the first alt.obituaries poster paid tribute to his dead cat. There were those who said it would never work. (“First of all, more than most groups this idea sounds like a joker magnet…. Who’s going to stay with [it], week after week, wading through all these threads about people he’s never heard of and doesn’t care about…?”) In spite of such reservations, a decade later, the site racked up 56,000 postings for the year, most from people who had been posting to the group for years. That’s a lot of talk about obituaries.
If the obit page of the daily newspaper is the floor of the Senate, or the official transcript, alt.obituaries is a smoky back room, the place where the deals are debated. Think of it as a clubhouse. The historian sits next to the guy who works in a tanker; the Upper East Side New Yorker hangs with the guy from the trailer park; obit writers mingle with people who have files bulging with clips. The walls of this clubhouse are scrawled with graffiti. In one corner someone counts the recently deceased poets, in another, all the famous people turning ninety that week. Members vie to be the first to post a new celebrity death. Occasionally one will take the floor to deliver a personal memorial. In the middle of this swampy mix of literary transcendence and fresh mud, one turns her head to whisper, “You can’t make this stuff up.”
I began to visit alt.obituaries after I saw Amelia Rosner’s presentation at the Sixth Great Obituary Writers’ International Conference. Cool and knowledgeable as she appeared making her speech, she might have been taken for an academic in other circumstances; but at the end of the conference, after one of her compulsive visits to the hotel computer, she had run back, flushed with a kid’s enthusiasm, shouting the news of Reagan’s death. Her standing in the frontier of obituary studies is secure: Amelia Rosner, who broke the news of Reagan’s death to a convention of professional obituary writers…
Rosner’s posts appeared in alt.obituaries every day, with six or eight obituaries cut-and-pasted from papers around the world, usually without comment, though sometimes she would flag something special: “excellent & quite sad,” she wrote after one obit subject’s name. She favored the British writers, who were both looser and more intellectual than the Americans.
Others on the newsgroup posted obits as well. One made sure the AP wire summaries of deaths of the day got posted, another kept up with dead sports figures; one followed military deaths, one kept up with dead lords and ladies; Bill Schenley posted great obits from the archives; and so on. Between their posts and Rosner’s, you could read your way around the English-speaking world. Obituaries from Malaysia, Australia, Pakistan, and Scotland were exotically sprinkled in with London and a variety of North American cities where the local papers ran feature-style obits, of either prominent or ordinary people—New York, L.A., and San Francisco; Washington, D.C., Toronto, Chicago, Boston, and Houston; Minneapolis, Cleveland, Denver, Baltimore, and Seattle; St. Petersburg, Austin, San Jose, and Sarasota. The datelines read like an airlines departure board, which they were, in a way.
In one brief period on AO, as the regulars called alt.obituaries, I read a streak of obits about people who had survived terrible chapters in history, beginning with one of the original Freedom Riders in the civil rights movement whose “life nearly ended 43 years earlier on a Greyhound bus in Anniston, Ala., when a mob firebombed the vehicle and held the door closed so the passengers—young people defying segregation laws as they rode through the region—would be unable to escape.” This was followed by a woman who had been injured in the deadliest airplane crash ever, in the Canary Islands, then had lived another twenty-four years, and a man who had been marked for extinction sixty years ago for singing to Jewish inmates in a concentration camp cell block on the eve of the Day of Atonement.
The obits that families pay for, which resemble classified ads, are usually full of dreary repetition—beloved…we’ll never forget…the best mom in the world—but feature-style obits are hotbeds of novelty. On alt.obituaries I read about people with wildly creative résumés: the former timber importer who became the Beatles’ Mr. Fixit; the runway model who became a cop; the microbiologist who became an actress. Gathered in AO, as if filling the last bus out of here, were the odd ducks: the scholar who wrote Reading the Bible in the Run-up to Death; a Russian ethnographer and expert on skinheads; and Sir Dawnay Lemon, one of the last cricket players “to bowl under-arm seriously.” (Bowling under-arm, you might be curious to know, is “now employed in serious games only as a cynical gesture against slow play.”) I couldn’t imagine more absurdly useless information, but I felt like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, one vivid character after another flashing past.
Besides the obits, plucked from websites around the world, there were personal notes from people who had followed the subjects’ careers, or worked behind the scenes on their last movie, or jammed with them in a roadside bar in Tarzana. When Danny Sugerman of the Doors died, an obit mentioned his wife, Fawn Hall. Was that the Fawn Hall, Ollie North’s shredding secretary from the Iran-Contra scandal? Indeed it was. One of the posters dug a news story from “the bowels of Googlecache” that reported that Hall and Sugerman had tried to sell a book manuscript about their drug addiction called My Heroin Honeymoon. “Sugerman said in an online chat on 29 January 1996 that ‘We are very much in love, living together with our dog, Bunky, in the Hollyweird Hills. In retrospect, we shouldn’t have gone to the Golden Triangle for our honeymoon, however.’” You couldn’t read that in the New York Times or even the Daily Telegraph.
The chatter around and between the obits on AO was like the chatter on most unmoderated, uncensored groups—obscenely freewheeling. Some of the liveliest discussions were off topic, and recklessly nasty. Never mind the political invective, which was everywhere in the contentious election year of 2004. Heated arguments erupted spontaneously over such things as whether or not deep vein thrombosis could be considered the third-largest killer disease in the U.S. Was DVT the same as stroke, or a subset of stroke?
Revelations made in candid moments came back to haunt the people who posted, and the tone was often personal and malicious. If people don’t want their comments to be archived, they have to indicate this when they post, or what they write will live forever. One poster, in a moment he must surely regret, wrote, “I have never found diapers big enough for me.” I know this only because it was cut-and-pasted and thrown back at him over and over again. Diaper boy, they called him, but he was hard to pity, because he flung more than his share of puerile invective. Anyway, pity in this arena is reserved for the dead, and sometimes not even for them.
Everyone seems to have at least one fellow poster whom he hates, passionately, and several posters claim from time to time to be stalked by their nemeses—so much for that stalk-free environment I was originally looking for. I felt a Darwinian indifference begin to seep in.
And, truthfully, I was entertained by the rants and scalding insults. As Schenley, one of my guides, pointed out, mean and nasty comments were not just tolerated but encouraged—as long as you were amusing. “Entertain us,” he said, “or shut the fuck up.” One scurrilous exchange came after someone posted a story about his father, a minister, who had swiped a plate of cold cuts after a wake. What a hypocrite, somebody pointed out. “Fuck off, you whorehouse miscarriage…,” came the vicious response, and he followed it up with, “go look in your own mirror, you monkey-spanked freak.”
I emailed the dialogue to a friend who had just joined a newsgroup on a different topic. That kind of rant was called a flame-out, he said, enthusiastically. “It’s so much fun!” (I noticed later, when I Googled “whorehouse miscarriage,” that my friend had hurled the phrase himself on his own newsgroup, one devoted to the sophisticated discussion of wine.)
I read the postings on alt.obituaries day after day from behind a curtain of anonymity, and kept my comments to myself. I was intimidated even when no insults were flying. Geeks abound on AO. Facts, like opinions, are tossed about like glitter in a disco. If a singer died, a pack of posters would gather, disputing the details of her obit, recalling the time they heard an obscure version of her sixth-most-famous song, discoursing at length about the record labels and session musicians involved. They knew all the backup singers! It was a tower of factual Babel to someone like me, in the early stages of the Deep Forgetfulness.
“Was this the John Victor Monckton born October 1955 who was a great-grandson of the second son of the next brother of the ancestor of the Viscounts Monckton of Brenchley?” read one actual query, and out of the whole universe of obsessions came a breathless reply: “Yes…. The deceased is a fourth cousin of the second Viscount Monckton of Brenchley.” I pictured the two royalists sitting in separate dusty libraries, tapping out their comments with little snorts of pleasure, their questions and answers sliding into AO history, below “monkey-spanked freak” and above the heated discussion of Veronica Lake’s forgotten charms (and ashes).
The baseball addicts updating the list of the Oldest Living Major League Ballplayers spoke an equally impenetrable patois, based partially on numbers. They’d be huddling, not in the library but in some remote bleachers over their scorecards. “My count currently shows Bongiovanni at #21,” one declared after the death of a major-leaguer forced a revision of their list of old survivors. “I have Harry Boyles (LOL) born 1/29/1911, at #21,” the second little old man countered. Ahha! After many blustery posts, it turned out one of them was using the print almanacs and encyclopedias, and the other was using online references.
Yes, I know, they sound like a couple of box-score freaks, splitting hairs in a Rotisserie League of the Doomed. But they weren’t making a list of the best hitters or the best base runners—they were ranking the oldest ballplayers, the ones most likely to die. The obit culture has mated with the Internet culture, and this is the result: people who spend their time making catalogues of the near-dead, monitoring the critical-care wards of the news, watching spores of pneumonia drift and settle, scratching out the names of the losers.
The man who tumbled off the roof of a theater where he was working into a vat of boiling tar died a terrible death, which was acknowledged soberly on AO. “I would rather be hit by a train,” one poster shuddered. “That had to hurt.” Another commented, sympathetically, “…most likely he was ‘dead’ long before he hit the ground…if he knew he was going into the boiling vat of tar, he stroked out long before he was par-boiled. The mind is wonderful in that respect.”
I don’t know; do you find this comforting? I find this terrifically comforting. This is why I’m spending four hours a day on AO, I tell myself.
“I work on asphalt tankers,” the next comment began, then the poster told the tale of a friend who died when he fell into an empty tank. It was sobering—perhaps too sobering. Someone observed that the accident caused the theater where the men were working to postpone its production of Tale of the Allergist’s Wife. “Could have been worse,” he speculated. “Could have been Hunchback of Notre Dame.” And with this sly nudge, the gates flew open, and out poured the tarred possibilities: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Song of the South. Horsefeathers.
Reading obits and commentary on obits day after day, I came to consider this exchange fairly restrained. After all, there were several sober comments before the monkeys began flinging poo. The Sara Lee executive who was murdered and left in a deep freeze got no respect before the group pounced. The nobody-doesn’t-like-Sara-Lee and just-warm-him-up-in-the-microwave jokes began immediately. The sympathy came later. “I know it’s part and parcel of how this NG [newsgroup] operates, but after a bit, I start feeling glad I’m not in this guy’s family—not just for the loss, but for the inevitability of the jokes. Ultimately, it’s somebody’s father-brother-husband-son who’s not so poppin’ fresh anymore.” The thoughtful author of this comment wondered about the day he dies, where the jokes will come from. Probably from his last name, he guessed, which was Beaver.
On AO, this was the equivalent of an engraved invitation. Just don’t die in a bordello, suggested one of the buzzards swarming over his post.
I emailed Amelia Rosner questions from time to time about the shorthand and protocols of AO, and she graciously responded. She wrote that she had several correspondents who, like me, were lurking. “Have you posted yet? What are you waiting for?” she ended one email.
Lurking! I felt like a creep, suddenly. I felt, actually, as I had when I lived in New York City and subscribed to the Geauga Times Leader, the newspaper of a small town in Ohio where I’d once lived. For months I eavesdropped on my old friends and neighbors without participating in their lives. When the paper was delayed in the mail for a week, I called up the circulation department. Oh, yes, the subscriber from New York City! they said. Anonymity is relative. Rosner was flushing me out.
Soon after, someone complimented her online for all the great obits she’d been posting. “Thanks!” Rosner responded. “I imagine millions of lurkers reading them. (Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother.)”
Lurkers—that word again. “This is as good a time as any to quit lurking and jump in,” I began, and posted my first comment. Soon, and for a few brief glorious months, I was one of AO’s ten most frequent posters.
I spent my workdays fishing for obits on the web, posting everything from a warm obit for a young transgender man in San Diego (“Whether as Angie or as Nathan, [the parents] said, he was still their adored middle child”) to a rollicking British obit of the travel writer Pete McCarthy, who found humor in the transformation of Ireland from a backwater to a “rapacious tourist trap.” (On a search for authentic Irishmen, McCarthy had been sent where the natives “ingeniously escaped the [tourists] by hiding in the last place anyone would think of looking for them”—Mac’s, a fake Irish bar in a theme park.) I used a trick one of the posters shared with me: to type in “dies” or “died” in the Google search box and click on news. What I got, with the occasional great obit, was page after page of death stories, murders, accidents, seven Japanese who had met on an Internet newsgroup devoted to suicide and got together to fatally inhale carbon monoxide. You know—death. And obituaries, as anyone who reads or writes obituaries will tell you, are really not about death. They’re occasioned by death, and they almost always wrap up with a list of those separated from the beloved by death, but they are full of life. The good ones are as intoxicating as a lung full of snowy air, as clarifying as the glass the ophthalmologist drops before your eyes, that brings the world into sudden sharp focus. The great obits aren’t the products of jackknifed tractor-trailers and hurricanes—the obits are released by such disasters.
Googling death itself was a little depressing, frankly. I returned to my method, a hunt-and-peck equivalent in which I went, site by site, to newspapers that published feature-style obits, and read their current issues. I kept index cards filled with website addresses for newspapers from the San Jose Mercury News to the Independent in London, and visited them nearly every day. My goal was to find at least three obits a day that had a good story, vivid details, and were not just reported, but written with some flair or touch of artistry. I looked particularly for wild stories buried in otherwise ordinary lives.
Michael Taylor’s obit of a Russian émigré in the San Francisco Chronicle contained everything I was looking for. Alexander Presniakov, eighty-nine, had been an engineer for Bechtel. He had also, as a small child, survived the Russian Revolution. His father, an officer in an elite royal cavalry unit, had fled with his family from the Bolsheviks
…through the winter night on a sleigh, racing across the ice and snow for the port of Murmansk, one of the outposts still held by the [White Russians]. At Murmansk, the captain of the last icebreaker held by the loyalists had drawn up the gangplank and was about to put to sea, as terrified refugees, stranded on the pier, pleaded with him to let them aboard. “My grandfather took my dad and threw him over the water and into the hands of a man who was standing on the deck of the icebreaker…. The man went to one of the ship’s officers and said, ‘Look, the child is here, the family is down there. We have to let them on.’ The officer finally dropped the gangplank and let them on.”
Where else would a story like this surface in our world? It wouldn’t be on the local news because there’s no video footage. It happened long ago, to someone who died, so we won’t be reading it on the front page, or the editorial page, or in the lifestyle pages, where cookie recipes meet movie reviews. Only the obituaries keep such personal history alive.
And what a bonus to find this history thrown in with your fifty cents’ worth of box scores and bad news and celebrity sightings. I even loved this particular obituary’s anticlimax: sometime after his historic escape from Russia, Presniakov had worked in upstate New York in a plastics factory. The plastics factory gave the whole obit perspective, and made the dramatic rescue from the Bolsheviks real—that mix of the exotic and the homely, the crisp, fresh snow the sleigh skimmed, mingling with the stink of melting plastic.
I knew immediately when I had found a winning obit. The Associated Press story about Granny Plant, who had died at 111, the oldest woman in Florida, hadn’t been fancy, but it had the million-dollar detail: she’d come from Alabama with her ten brothers and sisters by covered wagon. Dr. Lyle French, who died at eighty-nine, had made his reputation fifty years earlier, successfully removing half of several cerebral palsy patients’ brains; believe it or not, removing half a brain improved the patients’ ability to walk, or so reported Ben Cohen of the Star Tribune. I posted an obit of a former semipro baseball player, Pete Grijalva, who had spent the last of his ninety-seven years on a barstool at “The Ould Sod” in San Diego, reliving the day he played an exhibition game with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
I think of it as harvesting. I’m sitting at my computer, in an office over my garage, now overrun with obit collections and stacks of torn newspapers and molding teacups. I can’t start my day without cycling through my online newspapers, gathering the fresh obits, reading all of the posts. I want to tear my hair out when my computer is slow or my Internet connection falters. I bookmark the sites I visit most frequently, the big megillahs, The Times of London, New York, and L.A., and the Washington Post, the other London papers and the papers from Toronto, the Star and the Globe and Mail; the dozen or fifteen medium-sized papers; and my little favorites, the Orange County Register, where Robin Hinch writes about liquor-store owners and other ordinary people, and the Point Reyes Light, where Larken Bradley writes her pungent farewells to the old hippies and ranchers of northern California, and the Las Vegas Sun, where Ed Koch writes delicately worded farewells to old strippers and gamblers. (I posted one of a “casino greeter” and Rosner shredded both the obit and me; a simple Google, she complained, would have revealed the guy’s gangster connections, omitted from the obit.) Access to all of these is free, though most papers require a simple registration and a log-in with a password. Some days, I find three in a row, bing bing bing, one great obit after another. Other days, I am combing the country of the Web for hours, looking under bushes, in caves, behind hillocks. Give me a beautiful obit. Just one beautiful obit.
I use only material that can be found free online. Part of the fun of posting is sliding the cursor down to capture a found text, shading it blue, then lifting it and arranging it in the blank, pulsing box. What shows up in AO is only the text, though some posters also include the Web address, in case readers want to go back to the source to read it in classier type, or check out the photos. One frequent poster on AO refuses to cut and paste the text. Instead he scrupulously posts the Web addresses, along with the official “U.S. and friendly nation laws prohibit fully reproducing copyrighted material. In abidance with our laws this report cannot be provided in its entirety. However, you can read it in full today at the supplied URL….” My heart sinks when I click into AO and onto one of his topics, only to reach another address instead of a block of text, another set of gates that I have to register to pass through—not to mention that good-scout message. I’ve become so fast at whipping around the corners of my shortcuts, and I’m having so much fun, that his sober reminders seem like a traffic-court lecture.
As for copyrights, my magpie thievery is mild stuff. No money would change hands, anyway, and on AO, at least a few dozen people will see the work, attributed to a writer and a newspaper, without seeing the annoying flashing ad on the paper’s website. On the other hand, some of those people will follow links or track down a source, and be introduced to the flashing ad. At any rate, in the case of obits, the layers of ownership are complicated. Whose material is it, anyway? The real person who created his life and then died, or the writer of that life—or the publication that pays the health benefits of the writer of that life? An obit is a palimpsest, and by the time it gets to AO, its form is as important as its content. An obit without an author or publication credit is missing vital information, like a CD without liner notes, or an individual player’s box score detached from the rest of his team’s stats. Is this a Los Angeles Times’s obit by the wonderful Elaine Woo, or found gold from the St. Louis Herald-Tribune? I put on a new title line. “Rev. Mark Poole, Nader Supporter.” “Frances House, the James Bond of Priests.” Like Rosner and some of the other AO posters, I’m a disseminator, spreading the nectar.
What is it we do when we post? We create cut-and-paste art. Like collagists, like junior Robert Rauschenbergs or Picasso manqués, we use scraps of found newsprint and our own comments to frame and present our discoveries. The casual, open, interactive gallery of Usenet not only displays this art but catalogues it as well. Do others want to see what we’ve cut and shaped? They can go to the white box in the upper right hand corner of AO’s current page, the one marked “Search this group,” and type in “Alexander Presniakov,” or “The Ould Sod.” In a flash, a complicated work of art appears, one that starts as the personal art of someone’s life and history, continues as an artful piece of writing about that life, and lives on, selected and framed for our appreciation by a poster.
This artistic expression might actually be of use to someone who wants to compare the first drafts of the history of Katharine Hepburn or Ronald Reagan, but for the most part it is simply art, multilayered play that nourishes the soul. The best, I find, are made out of humble and unlikely material, like the obit of Suzanne Kaaren, ninety-two, an actress who had appeared in several Three Stooges shorts. In her obit for the New York Sun, Stephen Miller had crammed her identification with the fascinating particulars of her life: “an original Rockette, a champion high-jumper, a patent holder for a pop-top can, and in the 1990s [she] waged a successful legal battle against Donald Trump when the developer tried to evict her from her sprawling, rent-controlled Central Park South apartment.” Miller, an amused sponge of pop culture, had sprinkled her obit with deadpan sentences like, “The Stooges seemed to value her opinion, and regularly tried out new material on her.” The casual reader might have missed it, but Rosner was the poster. Over the cut-and-paste, she commented: “I would love any obit with the sentence, ‘The Stooges seemed to value her opinion.’”
There is something about reading these obits, framed by such comments and trailed by wisecracks, that adds layers of appreciation. It’s reading an obit with a gang of equally obsessed obit lovers; it’s reading an obit with the marginalia intact. The gossip doesn’t have to be phrased for a newspaper’s legal department. The jokes are up-front. The corrections and editorial comments are part of the reading experience, and so are the personal notes from those who know something more about the subject. In short, the posted obits bring you into the bustling business of obituaries.
When James Fergusson, the Independent’s obit editor, complained to me about the cultishness that had developed around obituary writing and reading, he added, pointedly, like some of these strange discussion groups…” I fought to keep my eyebrows from jumping while he trashed the obits scene on the Web. In fact, he didn’t mean these discussion groups—he meant alt.obituaries, “the one that you occasionally appear in a lot—Google.”
What a curious experience it is, being called cultish and strange by an obit editor. But what could Fergusson have against alt.obits? “Very often our obituaries are posted in that group and indeed elsewhere, without any acknowledgement, which is very irritating,” he explained. Amelia Rosner posts the Independent almost every day, and every blue moon neglects the citation. It’s easy to do if the newspaper’s name isn’t repeated after the byline and you have to type it in yourself. Rosner usually does this in the header with a compliment, or over the text—“fantastic Independent obit, really terrific, GREAT.” She once posted an Independent obit that she said was the “kind of obituary you get when you take an extra day or two and you really want to do a superior job.”
The Indy editor admitted he had seen these compliments. “She writes very cheery little things—I see that she occasionally puts comments.” And he appreciated their impact. “Even with a comparatively small circulation, the Independent punches above its weight, as the English expression has it…just by being there on the net. Even though so many newspapers charge for archived material, if people are alert, as so many of these discussion groups are, then they can steal stuff in time, and it’s then preserved.”
AO’s essential nature as a hijacking entity is bound to bother an obit editor. The posters don’t solicit this editor’s permission before disseminating his work; Rosner and all the alt.obits fans didn’t ask his cooperation to install him as king of the obits. But that help-yourself grab bag works both ways.
“I look at it every day,” Fergusson said, “because it’s often an efficient way of discovering the death of somebody you didn’t know had died. I can’t say I have entered into all the controversies. A lot of those people, I just want to know what they do the rest of the day. A lot of these people make me feel absolutely desperate.”
Of course they drive him mad; they drive all of us mad. But, what’s this? He’s a lurker?!
The man can say and do whatever he wants as far as I’m concerned, because he is a brilliant editor. A reserved, bookish man, he is also a pragmatist at a struggling newspaper with no library. Alt.obits is useful. He doesn’t have to embrace it, or resolve his mixed feelings about seeing his work on its pages, or even tip anyone off to his presence. He can just drop in and take what he needs.
So, let’s be perfectly clear about this. Alt.obits is populated by thieves and ghouls. It’s also a boon to professional journalists. It is Grand Central, the next stage in the obituary revolution, the messy frontier in the great obit expansion. It’s a place where readers can become critics and editors can monitor rumors of death. The writer from the western paper posts an obit her editor wouldn’t let her run. The webmaster of the site www.deadpeople.info verifies a death. As for the question of whose obits are better, it’s easy to see when comparisons are but a keystroke away. The result is a sharing of resources, a leaping of influences. The beating heart of a living art form is being tracked on the Web.