Did anybody good die today?

I have a random pile of “idea notes” in my office that I grab from time to time for inspiration. Often, I don’t even know the source of the note. This morning I discovered some striking comments by C. Claiborne Ray, a New York Times obituary reporter.

The Times writes many obituaries in advance of people dying, which are updated right before they go to print. While some might think writing obits to be depressing, Ms. Ray considered her work to be an exciting calling. “The finality of death could be a downer for some people,” she writes, “but if I could have designed a job for myself, the obituary job is what I would have designed. When I was in college, my friends and I loved The Times’s obituary page and used to fight over who would get to read it first.”

Right away in the morning, she and her friends would always ask, “Did anyone good die today?”

When I die, I hope that I can be an answer to that question, whether the obit is written or whether it is simply and genuinely reflected in the people I have known.


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