Stephen Miller was working as a computer technologist for a Japanese banking firm on the eightieth floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center the morning of September 11. Miller would be the first to tell you he was no computer expert—he had been a religion major at Oberlin College—but he knew more than the other people at his firm, and after six years on the job he was comfortable. The job paid well, but it was, you know, boring, and Miller was one of those shaggy guys who tend to settle on the fringe of academia, a restless intelligence in search of something to obsess over or write about—the weirder and more offbeat, the better. He had grown up next to a cemetery, a great place to ride your bike and get stoned, and after college he spent some time plugging names and job histories into formula obits on the night desk of more than one little New Jersey paper (bored, he took to filing fake obits: “I killed friends of mine,” he joked). With the exception of a few glints of life and humor in McG.’s obits in the Times, obits, he felt, were a neglected, hackneyed form, ripe for subversion. So Miller helped bankers edit their desktops all day, then went home to research and write darkly amusing alternative obituaries. For half a dozen years, he juggled his straight job and his twisted hobby. Periodically, maybe four times a year, he sent his friends and a growing list of fans a batch of obits in the form of a ’zine, a glorified newsletter he called GoodBye! The Journal of Contemporary Obituaries.
Closer to essays than classic obituaries, GoodBye!’s sendoffs left out some of the conventional features of obituaries. You wouldn’t find lists of survivors in them, for instance, and they often failed to cite the age of the deceased. “So what?” as Miller would say. He wrote about oddballs like an expert on Bigfoot, or the carny sideshow act Melvin Burkhart, “A Freak with a Nail Up His Nose.” He looked for the people lurking behind the news, like Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother:
What is every mother’s nightmare? Is it squashing junior while on a bender? Is it driving off a cliff with junior in the back? Is it sending junior off to an insufficiently researched kindergarten that turns out to be a front for NAMBLA? It is of course any of these, but they sound like teething pain compared to a nightmare few mothers could have had: junior turns out to be a murderous homosexual cannibal. And then come all the inconvenient, impolite questions, because everybody wants to know why.
He named the elephant in the room, and he riffed on it. In his obit of sex researcher Dr. Alex Comfort, Miller elaborately compared The Joy of Sex and The Joy of Cooking. He regularly ran a roundup of people who had died doing something stupid—the so-called Darwinian deaths. Where the New York Times would use a light brushstroke to liven up its obits with a funny detail, or throw an exotic mule diver or lighthouse keeper in with the lawyers and judges, GoodBye! hammered the nail up your nose. A decade after the London obit had developed into a form of entertainment, Steve Miller was cooking up his own version of the opinionated, storytelling obit. When a friend brought him the first collection of Daily Telegraph obituaries, he was knocked out; this was what he was talking about. He began describing his work as belonging in the British tradition. “GoodBye! followed the British model of laughing at the proud and including as much scandalous detail as possible,” he wrote. By the fall of 2001, GoodBye! had a few hundred paid subscribers, a steady stream of hits on its website, and a profile in the world of obits freaks.
At the age of thirty-nine, Miller was on joking terms with death. Little skulls decorated the pages of his ’zine. He had a new wife, a pretty paralegal. That morning, September 11, he was wearing a new pair of shoes that he hadn’t yet broken in. In his pocket was two hundred dollars, the proceeds of a “dead pool” he had organized with some of the bankers in his office; they had been gambling on which celebrities and newsmakers would die next. Were there any other ironies he could stuff in his pockets and take down eighty flights of crowded, smoky stairs? From his recollections of that day, delivered as a speech to other obits writers and posted on his website www.goodbyemag.com:
I remember the squealing sounds the building made while I walked down the interminable flights of stairs, the heat that made me sweat through my clothes and the eerie yellow light that suffused the stairwells. I remember feeling dizzy then, wondering if the vertigo was caused by the building falling or just my own nervousness. In the stairwells we really had no idea what had happened—no idea that airliners had slammed into the towers. All we knew was that it was something bad….
When the stairs got too crowded, he stepped onto one of the floors to look for a phone to call home. That’s when he saw the north tower with its gaping, flaming hole and bodies tumbling past. “Oh my God, they’re jumping!” the people at the window were screaming. He couldn’t reach his wife. He found a less crowded staircase to descend, made it out of the building just before it came down, and scrambled his way through the havoc without being hit by anything. He walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to a neighborhood where garbage-men were “still collecting the trash while dust from the collapse of my office rained on them, as if they were working in a snowstorm.” Incredibly, he ran into his wife on the street. How anyone survives such a day, while friends and coworkers are dying around him, is a story, and the story of this sardonic wise guy, the trafficker in obits, is no more or less incredible than anyone’s. The ironic forces fell short of killing him.
“Writing a large number of obits does not in any way qualify you to deal with death on the scale of wholesale carnage,” he wrote with the spooked humility of a survivor. He told his story to various members of the press, to the Fourth Great Obituary Writers’ International Conference the next spring, and to fans of his website. It troubled him that he couldn’t keep the chronology of the day straight or precisely describe the screams of the witnesses who suddenly realized the other tower was boiling over with people. The day had been so vivid, and his memories were so fractured. He wondered what that meant about his, or anyone’s, ability to represent a person’s life in several dozen inches of text. “If a few minutes of my own life, moments of irredeemable clarity that spanned at most a couple of hours, are so difficult to get right, how much harder is it to present a truly accurate version of an entire life in 20 or 30 newspaper inches?” he wrote. And what sense did narrative make when one’s life story could be interrupted so arbitrarily?
But instead of putting him off obituaries, the attacks of 9/11 seemed to focus him. He sent old issues of GoodBye! to the New York Times and a few other newspapers, offering his services as a writer. The Times passed with the excuse that they didn’t hire from the outside. But his efforts paid off a little more than a year after the attacks. As he was hurrying out the door with his wife—her water had just broken; they were headed to the hospital for the birth of their son—the editor of the New York Sun called Miller to discuss a job writing and editing their obits. A systems job on Wall Street that would have paid twice as much materialized at the same time but didn’t really tempt him. His hobby had become his calling, maybe even his destiny.