When Death Was My Muse

The Washington Post
May 03, 1998, Sunday

When Death Was My Muse
Suzi Parker

Death had its perks.

One Thanksgiving, I received an 18-lb. sugar-cured ham. A trio of mourners once gave me a huge lush fern. During the Christmas season, I received a shiny, colored tin of expensive chocolates and a sparkling brass holiday ornament. Then there was that time I ate a free lunch at the downtown Masonic temple and got a guided tour of the building --all because I wrote obituaries.

I never planned to write about death, especially in my first job out of graduate school. It wasn't on my Top Ten list of things to achieve before turning 30. With two degrees in journalism, I expected to be out in the field, chasing fires, investigating illegal activities in seedy motels and tracking down politicians' illicit business dealings and messy personal lives. I wanted to be Lois Lane. I wound up as Elvira.

My college dreams of Pulitzer Prizes hadn't prepared me for an obituary beat. Sure, I thought I could deal with death. Reporters imagine, some even thrive on, the worst--a multiple homicide, a plane crash killing 200 people, a blaze that wipes out an entire family. Big stories on the front page, leading to bigger "perspective" pieces and prestigious awards. Alas, I had to write biographies of the dead.

I was working at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. As stories about President Clinton often have noted, this is a small city in a small state. The proverbial six degrees of separation between any two people shrink to about half a degree. Everybody seems to know or have some connection to everybody else. Gossip is an honorable pastime, and obituaries are an agreeable way to catch up with old acquaintances.

For two years, I listened to sobbing, dignified, laughing, distraught--and sometimes just plain crazy-- survivors, all the while trying to decipher truth from grief-induced fantasies. Unlike so many of my newspaper colleagues, I never had the option of hearing the stories of my subject firsthand. For that I needed a Ouija board -- and nightly deadlines never allowed for that kind of indulgence.

My editors even sent me to study under the guru of obituary writing, Jim Nicholson of the Philadelphia Daily News, and learn the secrets of retracing the lives of the weird, the wacky and the wealthy. I came back asking all the right questions: What did they eat? What did they wear? What was abnormal or unique about them? Did they spend their lives trying to develop a cure for some disease? Or did they ride the rails with hobos? And how exactly did the deceased come to be named Velvet Couch?

When my day was done, I had buried a father who never spent enough time with his family, a Bohemian mother dying from cancer who did biblical scenes in needlepoint on every pew in her church, a lonely artist who raced into a burning house to rescue her five cats. I immortalized them in one column of newsprint and went home exhausted, wondering who would die during the night. I never worried about whether I would have something to write about the next day.

Death became me. I received kudos and memos from superiors. To friends and strangers, I was known as the Obit Girl. I was the hit of any party, naturally dressed in black. As I held my glass of wine, co-workers, one after the other, would ask, "Oh, Angel of Death, who died today? How did they die? How old were they? Tell us everything." Morbid curiosity ruled, and I, the Spice Girl of the Dead, possessed all the answers about those souls departed for the afterworld. More than once I heard from seasoned crime reporters, "I don't know how you do it. Amazing. I could never do it."

Truth is, I really didn't know how I did it. I often woke up at 3 a.m., sweating and paralyzed by dreams of the dead. I told no one that, as a child, I had feared death, funerals, hearses, caskets--and that I still held my breath whenever I drove past a cemetery. Even now, I go out of my way to avoid a funeral procession on the highway.

I hid my sadness for the families I interviewed. My colleagues didn't know that at the end of the day I sat in my car, blasted the radio and let the tears gush from my eyes.

In my two-year tenure on the obit desk--before I burned out and asked for another beat--I learned that death plays a funny game. For each byline, my mortality stared directly back at me. Every story toughened my heart a little more and numbed my emotions. I began to feel nothing except the wet tears on my face at the end of a long, draining day. Every night, I crawled into bed believing that, in the end, death wins.

But after the crying stopped, I pondered this job and realized that I, in fact, liked death's generosity. Besides the gifts, it provided me with local fame, and sappy, yet completely sincere, fan letters and phone calls. My obituaries often were printed in funeral programs, glued into scrapbooks and laminated as bookmarks. Sources, even funeral directors, called to inform me when a fascinating or prominent person was at death's door. Some people phoned and begged to reserve a space in the column for their dying loved one.

Over time, my colleagues no longer considered obit writing a lowly clerk's job. For all the tears, nightmares and eventual burnout, they could see that I had connected with readers--day in, day out--on a deep, personal level. Death had given me new life.

Suzi Parker is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Economist, the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times magazine.