Only last week did I discover that writing obituaries can be dangerous.

This emerged from the revelation made by a veteran staffer in the New York Times newsroom. To a group of us journalists taking part in a weeklong seminar he disclosed a current project he is working on: an obituary for David Rockefeller, long one of New York’s most prominent bankers.

Mind you, Mr. Rockefeller is not dead yet. In fact, at 93 he may, for all I know, be thriving.

But newspapers have been long accustomed to anticipating the deaths of notables and keeping accounts of their lives in designated files while awaiting the departure of their subjects.

So the Times will be prepared should anything dire happen to Mr. Rockefeller.
What gives the story an expected twist is another fact connected with the obit. There have been four previous drafts written by Time’s staffers for Mr. Rockfeller.

And guess what those four writers all have in common. They are all dead!
So one must wonder how the narrator of this anecdote can live with his new assignment. Is he not tempting fate to take it on? Does he not fear that Rockefeller will outlast him the way he did the four others?This revelation marks the first time I have ever heard a journalist admit writing a pre-death obit. Despite my being a newspaper junkie, I never expected to hear such an admission.

I had always presumed journalists refrained for fear of seeming to warm their hands in anticipation of an event that the subject almost surely does not want to happen.
I thought them like presidential speech writers, not allowed, at least beforehand, to acknowledge crafting the words to be spoken by the great one.

At the risk of seeming old-fashioned and, perhaps, ghoulish, let me confess loving to read obituaries. I’m not as bad as my grandmother, however, who invariably asked me the same question whenever I fetched her newspaper from the front porch.

“Who’s dead?” were her first words. As a child I found this curiosity rather strange but I have grown closer to this mentality myself.

Over the past couple of decades many American newspapers have improved their obit writing. They have taken to sleuthing out details of their subject’s personality that formerly would be ignored or considered undignified.

Previously they had carried to extremes the old Latin adage, “De mortuis nil nisi bonum” (About the dead, nothing but good.)

My main advice to American obit writers would be to honor eccentricity. That is what makes obituaries in British papers so fascinating to read.

The Brits have a long tradition of cultivating eccentricity. This results in printing details about people’s lives that American papers have regarded as frivolous or unnecessarily negative.

For instance, the Tablet, a periodical published by lay Catholics in London, once carried an obit that I have cited before. It serves as a fine example of the kind I most enjoy reading. Written by Cambridge University historian Eamon Duffy, it deftly highlights the eccentricities of Herbert McCabe, an English priest whom I once knew.

Giving the flavor of the man, Duffy writes: “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 then 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.”

I doubt that the obit currently being prepared for David Rockefeller will be as rollicking as this one. However, I do hope that the latest in the line of Times staffers to take on the task will, if he survives this chore, bring out whatever oddities Rockefeller may have had.

Richard Griffin