Ascribe it to my age, if you will, but I am becoming a fancier of obituaries. The newspaper pages that carry them do not rival my addiction to those pages devoted to sports, not yet at least. But I confess loving to read accounts of people’s lives seen from the vantage point of their deaths.

This pleasure, of course, increases when the obituary is written by a master of the genre. The writer who can combine incisive appreciation of the person’s distinctive traits with the well-turned phrase delights me. Anyone who can bring out the departed’s uniqueness, appreciate the person’s gifts while not omitting relevant faults, and treat readers to fine prose makes me happy.

You may be relieved to hear, however, that my obit love does not approach my maternal grandmother’s. As a young boy visiting her house in Peabody, MA, I would be sent downstairs to pick up her Salem Evening News. The first question she would ask me when I returned was “Who’s dead?” Then she would open to her favorite page and read about local friends and acquaintances who had passed on.

In recent weeks an obituary that I discovered in the Tablet, which calls itself an international Catholic weekly and comes out of London, provided me with warm delight. It dealt with the life of Herbert McCabe, a priest who belonged to the Dominican Order, and served as theologian, writer, and editor. Having had some association with him in the1960s added to my relish while reading his obit.

My bias is that the English write better obits than we, their former colonists, do. Or, if not, they have better material to work with. That’s because of the proud tradition of eccentricity that the Brits have maintained for so long a time. Surely they produce more characters per capita than we Americans can ever hope to do. And members of the clergy may number more of them than those of other professions.

Herbert McCabe belonged to that great tradition, as his obituary brings out. Written by Cambridge University historian Eamon Duffy, this obit in fact calls McCabe one of the British Catholic Church’s “most gargantuan characters” and then goes on to show why.

Early on, Duffy gives the flavor of the man: “To the end of his life his personal appearance with his wild shock of hair and his ancient and rarely washed sweaters, remained redolent, in more senses than one, of the student chaplaincies of the Sixties.”

Not glossing over McCabe’s faults, the obituarist says: “He was never an easy man to live with, relentlessly tenacious in argument and, especially as the evening waned and the level in the bottle dropped, sometimes cruelly scathing to those he judged guilty of woolly thought or moral evasion.”

You would not expect a man like this to rely on conventional transportation and he did not. “McCabe roared into his friends’ lives on a beaten-up motor-bike, booted and duffel-coated and ready to talk till the pubs closed, and preferably later if anyone had a bottle in their bag.”

For fear these quotes make McCabe seem merely an eccentric or even a drunk, the writer recognizes in him marvelous abilities and fierce loyalty to friends. Yet he was also what Duffy calls “essentially lonely” and often unsure of himself.  

Toward the end, the writer of this obit speaks of a fall that left McCabe enfeebled. Of his response, Duffy says “he endured this affliction with an endearing gentleness which amazed those who had known only the theological gladiator of his prime.”

Summing up with a broad sweep, Duffy finally says of his subject: “He was a rare and lovely man. God rest his mighty soul.”

This obit strikes me as a work of art. In a few hundred words the writer has given us another human being, full of achievement yet plagued by problems and personal insecurity. The writer shows rich appreciation of his colleague but also shows us that he was merely human.

This kind of obit serves as a mini-biography until someone decides to write a full one. Like skilled biographers, Eamon Duffy has the virtue of refusing to oversimplify the life of a man perhaps even more complicated than the rest of us. Without being judgmental, he brings out his subject’s contradictions, inconsistencies that mark every human life.

Growing older has given me more sympathy toward other people both living and dead. For the dead, if they have the good fortune to receive a skilled obit, it becomes easier perhaps to appreciate a person against the backdrop of their whole life course. “Nothing became him in life like the leaving of it,” words spoken about the Thane of Cawdor in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, sometimes apply to others. The ending of a life in itself can commend the person to us most, as it did for me with my friend, Herbert McCabe.

Richard Griffin