Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Insider's View of the Obituary Industry

Blog reader Laura tipped me off to this great column at lemondrop by Elizabeth Lardie, a professional obituary writer. Lardie writes with humor and distance, as you'd expect from someone who deals in death every day ... but she also manages a nice degree of reverence for what she does, as she shows in today's column, where she is shocked by a coworker who comes by each morning to ask if there are any "cool" dead people.

Here's the intro. paragraph from one of her columns:

"After a mere few months as an obituary writer, I got disturbingly accustomed to saying things like, 'Unfortunately, we wouldn't be able to say that your grandmother was beloved, since that would be editorializing.' It was very easy to forget the implications of a day's work. It was more than easy. It was necessity."

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