Bob CollinsAlex Tizon, who wrote an essay about is family’s slave, lied to the reporter who had to write her obituary. Today, she apologized for what she didn’t know. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Tag: The art of the obituary
The Americans with Disabilities Act didn’t just make it easier for people with disabilities to move around. It literally changed the way we think about the worth of people. Read more →
Stillwater Area Schools’ Oak-Land Junior High School posted suicide awareness phone numbers and a few pieces of advice on how to talk about the problem. That’s almost always a sign that a student has died by suicide. Read more →
There are bigger stories in the world than the death yesterday of David Letterman’s mom. So why are we so sad about someone we didn’t know?
Because we did. Read more →
Orin Doty, who died late last month, provides today’s quote worth remembering: ‘One person doing something is better than a thousand people doing nothing.’ Read more →
Ira Glass’ essay about his neighbor and friend is as personal an insight into Glass as you’re ever going to hear. But it also motivates us to reflect on the vast drama of people living their lives every day — drama that usually goes unnoticed but reflects the essence of who we are, quirks and all. Pain and all.
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Perhaps the best time to have a funeral is while we’re still alive. Read more →
Jean Oddi died on Monday in Columbus, Ohio and the local newspaper — the Columbus Dispatch — appropriately observed the unwritten rule of good obituaries: You don’t edit out swear words when the departed write their own obit.
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Tucked in the obituaries in today’s Worthington Daily Globe is the story of John and Beverly Troth, who were both 95 years old when they died eight hours apart on Monday.
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Given the characterization of mental illness, it’s safe to say that an enduring ‘Popeye’ Charping’s legacy is that he wasn’t very good at being a spouse and parent. Read more →
There aren’t a lot of obituaries that end up on the editorial page, but Casey Schwartzmier, who died of a heroin overdose earlier this month, would have wanted it that way. Read more →
Sutin and his father, Julius, managed to escape from the ghetto to the forest region of eastern Poland, where Sutin became the leader of a small group of Jewish partisans who managed to accumulate arms and become a fighting force against the Nazis and the collaborating Polish police. He met his love in a bunker. Read more →
Several fans of NewsCut’s The Art of the Obituary category have called our attention to Friday’s passing of Dr. Kay Heggestad of Madison, Wis.,who merited two obituaries in Sunday’s Wisconsin State Journal.
She wrote one of them. Her family wrote the other, to fill in the extraordinary details she left out. Read more →
When he died last Friday, Chris Connors, of York, Maine, was said to have expired from a combination of stubborness and whiskey. Also ALS and pancreatic cancer.
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The family of Shane Paul Lohan, of Hanover, Mass., wasn’t reluctant to describe their son in the obituary his mother had to write for him last week.
He was a drug user; heroin, as near as we can tell. It killed him at he age of 24. Read more →