The Stuff:
This book is a collection of approximately 90 obituaries and write-ups from the New York Times Magazine. The focus is on interesting lives, regardless of whether the person was famous or lived an everyday life. Not all are saints. One is a reputed gangster, whom one acquaintance referred to as “a nice man.”
Most selections are positive, leaving you believing the person had a good run. A few are heart-wrenching, like that of seven-year-old pilot Jessica Dubroff, who died in a plane crash with her father and flight instructor after taking off in bad weather while trying to fly across the country.
In his foreword, Russell Baker writes, “The rule here is: no giants… the nature of twentieth-century life has also been shaped by multitudes of whom most of us have never heard.” (p. vii)
Typical of the sort of person included is Anne Scheiber, though her story is hardly typical. Scheiber retired from the IRS in 1944 with some $5000 in savings. She lived quietly but invested aggressively. By the time of her death in 1995 at 101, she’d built a nest egg of $22 million, which she bequeathed to the Yeshiva University for women students. She’d never attended the school, nor had the school ever heard of her. The donation was her way of empowering women after experiencing discrimination during her time at the IRS.
There are some limits, of course. The obits are from one newspaper—The New York Times—and are from a short period of time. Most are from the 1990s, with a few from the 1980s. Most (though not all) are of white people from the East Coast. Yet what a slice of human experience!
Thoughts:
No organizing principle, either by topic or chronology, seems to order the selections. An entry for Zora Arkus-Duntov, an engineer who popularized the Corvette and died in April 1996, follows one for Fred Rosenstiel, who was independently wealthy and liked to plant gardens in New York. Rosenstiel died in June 1995.
Of course, reading this brings sadness. One sees grieving families. Even when a particular death is best viewed as a release from suffering, there is always grief for the life that was. For example, in “The Long Good-bye” (p. 411), Dudley Clendinen writes, “My cousin Florence Hosch finally died the Wednesday before Christmas about a thousand days after she wished to.” Florence, he tells the reader, was nearly ninety-three. She had ninety good years, but the last three years were wretched.
I once read an article about the current generation trying to use Windows 95 on hardware then in use. “You mean you have to turn the monitor on?” I’ve joked about the anachronistic skill I recall of being able to center text on something called a typewriter.
In his foreword, Russell Baker writes:
“Consider the multitudes who once knew how to cook in an open fireplace, how to harness a horse to a buggy, how to hand-crank a tin lizzie on a freezing morning, how to butcher a hog, how to bake a cake from scratch, how to bank a coal furnace.” (p. viii)
With the passing of generations, such ready knowledge is often lost.
The last entry was of those buried in Potter’s Field on Hart Island, unclaimed bodies and infants. A group of inmates lives there and attends to the burials.
This brought to mind the refrigerator trucks NYC used at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to hold the bodies of those lost to the disease. A distant relative of mine passed away about the same time, not to COVID, but to a constellation of conditions arising from chronic alcoholism—at the age of thirty-four!
It made the words of one of the workers burying the unclaimed bodies all the more poignant: “Ought to worry about these poor folks when they’re alive. Not now.”
No one gets out of this alive, so it’s best to try to make something of what we’ve got while we’re here—kindness to family, friends, and strangers; finding joy; and perhaps learning to bake a cake from scratch—even if we don’t get written up in The New York Times. Life is finite and thus precious.
Title: The Last Word: The New York Times Book of Obituaries and Farewells
Author: Ed. Marvin Siegel
First published: 1997
Reviews of Old and New Stories. Mostly Old 
I love your closing paragraph. Indeed, take advantage of when the person is alive and healthy to be with them or don’t worry about coming for the funeral. My parents were just cremated and we had a memorial for them; no big funeral expenses.
My mother-in-law was cremated and requested no memorial. She was 96. Six months before she passed away, she was still doing her own laundry. My husband called her every Friday evening and we visited every other Sunday. I always wish she was around to talk to, but we left nothing unsaid.
That sounds like a fascinating read. When Newspapers were still a thing i read the obits. I would rather read this than view the book of the posed deceased funeral photographry from the late 19th & early 20th Centuries.
It was interesting and sad and sombeBr.
It was interesting and somber, but it also made me remember how precious life it.
This sounds interesting. Did new journalists sometimes cut their teeth on writing obituaries?
Yes. Used to be. I understand it’s gotten more respectable recently, though, and a well-written obit is an art form, paying tribute to the deceased.
the Times actually wrote one up for Hercule Poirot after he died in Agatha Christie’s “Curtain.” I read it years ago.
How cool! Readers do really sometimes come to think of a character as real, while at the same time realizing they are not.
Yes. Poiroit was such a character with so many little odd habits.
Found it. It wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it would be. There’s this internet thingie (:-)):