Greek popular singer Giorgos Mazonakis died suddenly on Wednesday at the age of 54. According to initial information, the beloved artist died in Elpis hospital in Athens from a heart attack. Media reported that the ambulance service EKAV received a call at 4:30 on Wednesday afternoon from a private doctor’s clinic in Kolonaki district of […]
When I was little I had a ritual with my parents where, as they tucked me into bed, they’d tell me a few reasons why they loved me (yes, I know how lucky I am to have been raised in an environment like this). As part of their list, I always asked them to say I was careful, and dutifully they’d repeat, “Yes, of course, we love you because you’re so careful.” I needed my parents’ words to ward against a recurring-day-mare-type vision I had in those years, in which I climbed onto our roof and then, while recklessly peering over the edge, toppled off the eave and cracked open my skull. I would never have put myself in that situation in waking life; I was so cautious that even an imagined scenario in which I endangered myself was enough to terrify me. But being reassured of my carefulness night after night made me feel safer.
My prudent youth did involve a handful of responsibly chaperoned birthday parties at Northern California climbing gyms, and a handful of climbing excursions in the Sierras with my grandfather, but ironically the flatland of Minnesota is where I got serious about the sport. During those unrelentingly brutal winters I seized upon climbing for exercise and entertainment—in the gym, since it was colder than the dark side of Mars outside—as a way to stave off cabin fever in the long months of permafrost. On a recent visit back to the Twin Cities at the close of one such winter, right after a session at the gym where I first cut my teeth, I posted up on the patio of an organic café to bask in the abrupt warmth of springtime. A guy sitting at the table next to me asked if I was a climber—our veiny forearms signal us to one another like Harley-Davidson jackets do for bikers—and I said yes. We started chatting.
This guy had just moved to town to save his own life. He was a paraglider, parachutist, kite-surfer, and wingsuiter, and he said that in the last year a dozen members of his inner circle “went in,” including his best friend and his brother, all in accidents related to their gravity-skirting pursuits. At first I couldn’t figure out what he meant by “went in,” but as I listened to him enumerate their various methods of “going in,” I eventually realized he was telling me they had all died. I could hardly comprehend the reality he described: being at the heart of a community where loved ones blink out in droves, like candles in a gale. He knew if he stayed in the game as a professional extreme athlete, pressured by peers and sponsors alike to remain at the cutting edge, he himself wouldn’t be around much longer. So, sight-unseen, he moved to the flattest and boringest place he’d ever heard of: Minnesota. He came specifically because there weren’t any cliffs for him to throw himself off. Only a few months into his new life as a Minnesotan, he was still in the jittery, cold turkey phase of his thrill detox.
“You done much free soloing?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said. A truer answer would have been HELL NO I’M A WIMP, MY PARENTS LOVE ME BECAUSE I’M CAREFUL.
“Amazing feeling,” he said. “Being certain if you fuck up you’ll die, and being equally certain you won’t fuck up.”
We listened to the birds, sipped our coffees. I picked at the remains of my huevos rancheros. The juncos twittering around us sounded gladder than usual to be alive. I asked, “Is it really that much less fun to have a rope on? Like, clip a few draws? Place some cams along the way?”
He shook his head. “Once you been hucking yourself off the high dive, it’s no fun jumping off the edge of the pool.”
This at least rang true. Even I find it boring to jump off the edge of the pool.
“Glad you got out when you did,” I said.
He nodded grimly, seeming less glad than I was. Then I asked what he was getting up to instead. Of course, it was the most extreme thing you can do on flat ground.
“Ultramarathons,” he said.
He didn’t seem interested in probing his own psychology or rationales. He unapologetically liked the feeling of being adrenalized, and he wanted to feel that feeling as much as possible without killing himself. Why turn it into some elaborate trolley problem? For those living on the outer edges of risk, I suspect confidence is the key to survival: the confidence in one’s ability to assess a risk and then the confidence to execute the necessary action once a risk is deemed acceptable. Extreme athletes don’t seem to think too hard, at least on an abstract philosophical level, about the dangers they face. Their engagement is logistical, methodical. Far more productive to test the snowpack, visualize the beta, read the weather report, double-check the way the parachute is folded, determine what direction the wind blows down the talus field.
Rather than focusing on what we stand to lose, what riches does risk put us in position to gain?
But risk has been on my mind of late, because, much to my own surprise, my relationship to it has been changing. Recently I was on a very tall boulder called the Kraken, and it felt like I spent a hundred years with the sand in its penultimate pocket rolling grittily under my fingertips while I searched the rounded top of the block for a hold I could trust. A part of me is there still, suspended in that epoch of hold hunting, gearing up for the final move. This is one of risk’s most obvious gifts, the chance to experience that rare, thin-slicing acuity where each separate millisecond stands out like an image etched in stone. The present dilates to activate the past and future, too, as though we’re living our whole life all at once. With a cognitive rapacity available only during a fight-or-flight response, we cast our gaze forward, asking what grim future will bloom if we fall. And simultaneously cast it back, asking what errors in our past have brought us to this crossroads. Have I survived a situation like this before? Will I get lucky and survive again?
In a film, that’s where the music would come up, dissonant strings, ringing ears, the drums increasing tempo. It’s odd that the times of our deepest dumbstruck not-knowingness should be called “moments of truth.” I found a shallow, sandy divot for my right hand, threw my left heel high over the lip, and rolled onto the top of the boulder. A friend took photos, but it makes me uncomfortable to look at them.
From the back seat of a lifted pickup, deep house oozing out of a handmade portable stereo that Owen built into an antique suitcase, I look over the truck bed at the contrail of dust we send into the Eastern Sierra evening. Our pilot expertly navigates a kaleidoscope of dirt roads to deliver us at the Crab Cooker. Tumbling out of the truck we grab towels, water bottles, and puffy jackets, and walk a raised wooden path to the area’s hottest hot spring. An eggy, algal cloud envelops us before the spring itself comes into view. Then we see the rock-rimmed pool, a steam plume ascending from a dark crater. The water here, when it first comes to the surface, hovers around 150 degrees Fahrenheit—hot enough to cook crabs, no exaggeration in the name—so people cut it with cold water from a surface stream until it comes down to around 110. The pool is still hotter than any man-made tub I’ve ever sunk myself into, and its scalding sting feels spectacular on the aches we’ve accrued from several consecutive climbing days at the Buttermilks and in Owens River Gorge. We keep our hands lifted above the surface of the water so our hard-earned calluses don’t melt off.
Parallel to us climbers, there runs an entire subculture of hot springs enthusiasts who travel the country to find the loveliest, toastiest, unlikeliest geothermal pools that tectonics has to offer. Connecting with this odd population of wanderers is one of the surprise pleasures of our annual Bishop trip. The Crab Cooker must rank high on their list. Wild sage and scrubby junipers riddle the sand, boulders punctuate the foothills and draws, and the impressive ridgelines of the Sierra Eastside tower over it all, seemingly close enough to splash with the flick of a finger. At sunset the land gets saturated with glory and import and impeccable desert light, and we in our good fortune get to gaze at this panorama while the guts of the planet warm us to temperatures well in excess of our own hearts’ heat.
When, to our surprise, two bodies coalesce out of the steam, we apologize for our loudness and promptly shut down the stereo. The strangers don’t mind, they say, they’ve been enjoying the ruckus. The new arrivals are a pair of Germans, a father and his grown son, who have been touring America together. Before long our separate conversations become enmeshed in the small pool. We learn that the younger soaker, the son, used to be an accomplished extreme athlete. He somberly explains that he found himself a lonelier and lonelier survivor as his BASE-jumping and wingsuiting friends went in. Hearing the phrase now for the second time, I’m struck by the gentleness of the euphemism, far softer than the verb to crater, as in “their parachute didn’t deploy and they cratered,” which I’d heard in gruffer conversations with BASE jumpers. I picture these lost friends “going in” to a collective reserve of matter and spirit, the heavenly welter where all unmade is remade. Although, with the image of a crater in mind, I suppose “going in” could refer not to the eternally cyclical return to one’s mysterious origin but rather to a body “going in” to the ground at terminal velocity. Needless to say, I don’t ask the German.
He explains to a rapt audience that last year, upon successfully landing a jump, his still-open parachute caught a fierce gust of wind that slammed him into a cliff and dragged him across a talus field. Multiple impacts against the rocks shattered innumerable bones, including several in his back. By coincidence, the guy’s best friend was flying the emergency helicopter that came to collect his ragdoll body. To those on board it looked like a hopeless case, a certain fatality, but in the end the guy survived. Hearing the story, I look to my own best friend soaking by my side. We make eye contact and discreetly drop our jaws a fraction of a centimeter, a silent exchange of Jesus fucking Christ.
“Jesus Christ,” I say aloud to the German.
“It’s no problem,” the guy says, gesturing grandly at the mountain-rimmed basin that surrounds us. “Happy I am living.”
He’s still in the middle of a years-long rehabilitation process, he explains. He points to a neck brace he’d removed before his soak, whose plastic struts I now see glowing in the moonlight, a safe distance back from the water where it won’t get splashed. “It’s no problem to wear that sometimes.”
“Just like when he was a baby,” the dad says cheerfully. “I help him eat, then I help him shit!”
We typically view risk in relation to death—inviting its possibility, skirting its tentacles—but I’ve lately been exploring a philosophy that views risk, instead, in relation to life. Rather than focusing on what we stand to lose, what riches does risk put us in position to gain? This question came by way of a book called Éloge du risque by French philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle. It hadn’t yet been translated into English, but with undergrad French memories and a Larousse dictionary in hand, I bought a copy and dove in. I worked on my translations of Éloge du risque while riding the Flatiron Flyer bus between Boulder and Denver. During this commute the Flatirons themselves rise to the west like a fleet of ships tacking in formation, their huge reddish triangular faces making a tidy row of sails afloat on a choppy sea of pine.
A route called Freeway ascends the Second Flatiron (they’re numbered sequentially from north to south), and locals tell me it’s a fun, dead-easy romp for the entire thousand feet of the eastern face. Nobody bothers to use the melodramatic phrase free solo; they just call it a scramble. The route has seen barefoot ascents, no-hands ascents, and, the clearest indicator of its difficulty, an ascent by a climber wearing roller skates. For some reason I never wonder whether I’m going to climb it, I just know, innately, that I’m going to. It’s an indicator that my relationship to risk is changing. Even still, as I prepare to solo—sorry, scramble—the Second, I approach it with a solemnity bordering on gloom. I warm up at home, stretch, fuel and hydrate, tidy the basement so that if I die I won’t leave an unsightly mess for my landlady to deal with. Ridiculous. The short drive across town feels haunted, with the Flatirons leering in the windshield as I pilot my way westward. I park and take a deep breath before exiting the vehicle. Walk up the trail, a well-beaten one that sees countless tourists and toddlers safely along the base of the range, taking every rock-hopping step with exaggerated care, testing the infallibility of my balance. And then I sit at the base of the Second for ages, meditative and serious, while a string of a half-dozen stoned teenagers fire the route, unroped, not even pausing their giggling conversation as they step off the trail and onto the rock.
Supposedly there’s a crux around fifty feet off the ground, but for me it turned out the crux was just deciding to do it. When I finally put on my climbing shoes, tuck my sneakers into my backpack, and lay my hands on the crystalline stone, hard moves are absolutely nowhere to be found. The climbing feels easier than walking, in fact, since I get to use my hands in addition to my feet. From a hundred feet up, and again at three hundred and again at five hundred, I glance down at the sandstone ramp the foot of the mountain makes, observe how the trail gets thinner and the trees get smaller as I rise, and experience a wave of giddiness. I sip that sensation like champagne, peering, bubbling, then I turn my face to the wall and continue the scramble. At the summit I sit a long time and look east at a flat expanse of town and plain that appears to extend all the way to the Atlantic. I’ve wagered my life, and have been repaid tenfold.
A week later, I take an incremental step up in difficulty and try the Third Flatiron. Locals, I notice, do tend to refer to this one as a solo, not a scramble. I’m exiting the kiddie pool. Again I follow the trail through Chautauqua Park with a measure of unease in my gut, hiking through grassy open fields up into the pine sea, and then across a stretch of loose talus to the base of the route. A thousand angling, rippling feet of sandstone thrust westward, the summit hidden from view. I bring my chalk bag this time and coat my palms with a layer of white dust to keep them from slickening with sweat. Unlike the Second, the Third is a legitimate, if moderate, climb. I make careful progress, never moving more than one limb at a time, testing each handhold for soundness, testing each surface for slipperiness, before entrusting my weight to it. Focus, rather than rhapsody, rules the experience. The crux comes at the top. Until that point I’d been hanging on bucket-like holds, generous craters, but the rock comprising the last twenty feet below the peak has been worn smooth by the elements. Though the terrain is low angle, it’s holdless as an asphalt road. This section, I knew from my research beforehand, would require a few moves of open-hand slab climbing. In the absence of tangible features on the cliff, you just paste your hands and feet onto the surface and rely on friction to hold you in place.
Slab is an unnerving, faith-based style of climbing, and those few moves—a thousand feet off the ground, knowing a fall would be fatal—demand a degree of meticulousness I’ve never before needed to summon. To summon it that afternoon is like flexing a new muscle for the very first time. I feel each grain of the gritty matrix as it deforms the skin of my fingertips, fitting the ridges of my fingerprint to match the ridges of the Flatiron’s surface. I attune to the gumminess of my shoe, the pressure of the ball of my foot compressing its rubber sole, filling completely the negative space of the rock’s surface. Death isn’t on my mind. It’s a million miles away. I know I will be perfect, and this perfection will make me invincible. If I fall, my last thought will be I never saw this coming. But I wager; I scurry. I summit. From the top I stare down at the backs of raptors, at the pine and the prairie, and again my spirit prospers.
The next morning from the bus I cast a lingering glance over the Flatirons. I look at the granulated ripples of the cliffs and superimpose my antlike image onto them, watching memories of myself crawl up the faces as if in footage captured by a drone. I’m still up there, forever taking those calm breaths, forever palming those grainy domes. Fellow commuters catch me wearing a moony smile. Now, pen gripped in my teeth, Éloge du risque open in my lap, my gaze drifts a click northward. My newfound muscle twitches. In the notebook for my scraps and outlines I write FOR RISK ESSAY: SOLO THE FIRST? After spending the day on campus I get back on the bus for my evening commute, and that scribbled notion digs into me uncomfortably. The wobble on the highway made my script look manic. It is manic. The idea stands squarely outside of what I consider to be an acceptable level of climbing risk. From the bus window the First dominates the ridgeline as the Flatirons fall into shadow. Morning and evening light seem to fashion two different ranges out of the same rock space. When I try on the idea of soloing the First, it feels like a too-small sweater pulled over my head, grabbing my skull. I know I should rip it off and discard it. But I could also push my way inside. I recall a strong, confident climber-friend whose trip report after soloing the First was simply, “I’m never going to do that again.” I wondered what had happened to turn his face so ashen, but he didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t pry.
These accident reports save lives more directly, more demonstrably, than poetry or scripture.
Climbing culture has a storytelling idiom I call “Close Calls.” They’re an inversion of just-so stories; instead of tales of creation like “How the Zebra Got Its Stripes” or “How the Giraffe’s Neck Got So Long,” Close Calls focus on tales of destruction like “How Rebecca Lost Her Leg” or “How Johnny Lost His Partner.” Years ago at the base of the Incredible Hulk, a gorgeous granite outcrop in the Sierras, Owen and I were preparing to climb the classic Red Dihedral. We’d undertaken the steep approach hike in the evening, stove heated some expired and deeply disappointing beef stew, and established our bivvy beside a picturesque rivulet riffling through a boulder field. Two young women camped at another minimeadow a few hundred feet downstream, and when the stars came up, they invited us down for a sip of whiskey. We splashed a bit of warmish bourbon into our unwashed bowls, resulting in a cocktail like a hot Sazerac with a beef-grease rinse instead of an absinthe one. During that night’s edition of Close Calls, we hear of a time an inexperienced leader led a pitch and built an anchor, and one of the women (now sipping her whiskey between plot points) followed him up, arriving at a worthless nest of protection that, had she fallen, would have sputtered from the wall and killed them both. Next my buddy describes watching a climber follow an outdoor route on top-rope, unclipping each draw along the way, and then, at the top, unclipping the two draws that held the rope, and then, the height of outrageousness, untying his rope and dropping it to the ground, meaning he was now clinging to holds a hundred feet off the deck with nothing else to hold him in place. By some miracle a professional climber was on a route next door and, seeing the disaster unfold, climbed to the stranded kid in minutes with a spare rope to reattach him to the world.
As with any public storytelling genre, there’s a ritual to it. One teller shares the scariest climbing story they’ve heard or experienced, a story of someone’s closest call. The fireside audience takes in the punchline—a survival unscathed, a rescue, an injury, a fatality—in solemn contemplation. After a respectful interval and perhaps another sip of whiskey, the next teller narrates an even closer call. For listeners familiar enough with safety systems to fully appreciate the danger, miscommunication, unpreparedness or negligence in these stories, the tales provide riveting entertainment, in their own grim way. But they serve a deeper purpose, too, in that they circulate these scenarios as a risk-prevention measure. The same could be said of the more formal narratives published by the American Alpine Club. Their style is unadorned, a blow-by-blow sequence of errors that led up to an injury or death on the wall, but safety-oriented climbers read these annual accident reports with biblical devotion. Instead of re-living old traumas, these prudent folks pre-live them, learning to deal with such catastrophes should they arise or, better yet, learning to avoid such catastrophes altogether. These accident reports save lives more directly, more demonstrably, than poetry or scripture.
We could easily swap Close Calls all night, but both teams are planning to start our ascents of the Hulk at dawn, so we force ourselves to break up the party before it gets too late. I brush my teeth, taking a gamble on unfiltered river water, and tuck myself into bed. In the sleeping bag, staring up at the densest panorama of stars I’ve seen in months, I wonder what moment, in my life so far, was the moment I was nearest to death. My own closest call, in a statistical sense, when my odds of survival were lowest. At first I think it would land among the instances when I was most afraid. There was a hike to a ghost town called Lundy when I was dead certain I was being stalked by a mountain lion. Or a time at an outdoor concert in Denver when gunshots broke out and the whole crowd stampeded in panic away from the brutal sound. Then I wonder if my closest call fell among the times I sustained an injury: a spinout on the highway from a blown tire, a fainting spell in the Rockies brought on by dehydration and exhaustion, a split forehead from an ice cave collapse that let me see my own skull through the hole in my skin. But in all likelihood, I bet the moment passed by me altogether unnoticed. One of my countless midnights on a two-lane country road, maybe, when the approaching headlights belonged to a drunk driver, or a trucker on the cusp of sleep, or a heartsick teenager composing a text to an ex. So long as they keep their car on the proper side of the yellow line, I never know the peril I’m in.
This evening in Boulder the sky is not its usual bluebird. From the egress window of my cheap-ass basement rental I see bulbous clouds gathering overhead. A handful of months have passed and by now the Second Flatiron scramble has become my go-to after-work workout. I lap it a couple times a week, not bothering with climbing shoes anymore, just using the same busted sneakers I wear for the approach hike. But when it rains, the rock slickens, the lichen sucks up moisture and magically transforms from a crust to a lubricant. Given the inclement weather, it’s shaping up to be a work night. So instead of soloing—sorry, scrambling—at sunset, I’m at my desk with a mug of mint tea, bringing Dufourmantelle into English word by word. Risk, she writes and I translate, “inaugurates an other time, as though traumatic. But a positive trauma.”
“An other time” makes me think, to my discredit, of the movie Donnie Darko. The premise of that film, as I interpret it, is that one night in a freak accident an airplane engine fell through the roof of the protagonist Donnie’s house, and should have crushed him, except that he was somnambulantly chasing a giant nightmare rabbit onto a golf course at the time, and thereby avoided his fate. This sets in motion an alternate universe—the one where Donnie lives—that runs alongside the one in which he rightfully dies. I think this is what Dufourmantelle means: When we take a risk, knowing we’ll either experience a near-miss like the Donnie who lives or a direct hit like the Donnie who dies, we create a narrative fork in the road. I’ve long wondered what wingsuiters, free soloists, and skydivers gain through their constant navigation of risk, and tonight I start to sense it. When carefully and responsibly considered, these dangerous activities let adventurers inhabit innumerable parallel universes. We get to live infinite lives and die infinite deaths as, in preparation, we imagine the outcomes and contingencies of each climb, each jump, each flight. The potential plotlines proliferate and the density of our life experience increases. Time dilates to accommodate not only the life we’ve lived and the life we will lead, but also all the lives we might have lived, and might yet lead.
I turn my attention to trauma positif. It’s an uncomfortable phrase. The language carries a reminder that many people experience risk and precarity only under duress. As far as I’m concerned, the privilege inherent in elective risk is alpinism’s original sin, and a key reason that, despite the vast increase in diversity and gender parity in climbing in the last decade, the sport has been slow to shake its aura of patriarchy and whiteness. But Dufourmantelle’s claims sound right to me. Just as negative trauma has the power to reshape the stories that people tell themselves about themselves and about the worlds they inhabit, so too can a trauma positif rewrite a person’s history, even as it rewrites their future. As a result of the risks I’ve taken, and the trauma positif of surviving them, I’m phasing out the story that I’m a meek person. Now, with demonstrable evidence, I must tell myself I’m capable of being brave. Maybe every time you risk your life, you lose it: You lose the life you had before taking the risk, and supplant that life with a new one. A solo of the First Flatiron feels this way for me. Ever since moving to town I’ve told myself I couldn’t solo it. So if I solo it, the version of me too frightened to try it will die.
Days later I see the headline in the local paper: “17-Year-Old Falls to His Death While Climbing Boulder’s First Flatiron.” There’s a photograph of the formation I’ve spent my daily commute mulling over, and the article below:
Equipped with camping and outdoor survival gear—but no climbing-specific equipment—a 17-year-old died after climbing alone and falling up to 100 feet or more from Boulder’s First Flatiron on Sunday evening.
Climber rescues, and non-fatal falls, are common every summer across the iconic rock formations above Chautauqua Park. But this appears to be the first accidental climbing death on the Flatirons in nine years.
The teenager—whose identity has not yet been released, and who officials initially said was 18—was found by a hiker near the base of the First Flatiron, above the Blue Bell Shelter in Chautauqua Park, according to Boulder County sheriff’s officials.
Sheriff’s Cmdr. Mike Wagner said the teen was free-soloing—climbing alone, without the use of ropes or gear—on the First Flatiron when he fell possibly more than 100 feet and suffered “massive traumatic injuries.”
Sources report that the climber took a selfie and posted it to Instagram shortly before the fall. There follow, in the next few days, admonishments from the climbing community, the oft-repeated self-assurances that this kid was unprepared but we know better, and more than a few references to a phenomenon known as “Kodak Courage,” where the possibility of taking an impressive photograph pushes a climber past their typical margin of safety. The next time I walk up to the foot of the First Flatiron, a sober memorial sits at the base of a pine tree. Cards, flowers, offerings. A printout of the photo the climber snapped and posted minutes before his death.
Toward the tail end of the same season the paper runs another headline: “Climber Dies After Falling from Boulder’s First Flatiron.” This time there’s a different stock photo of the mountain, now caked with snow. The article reads:
A man climbing on the First Flatiron on Thursday afternoon fell to his death, the second person to die following an accidental plummet off of the iconic Boulder landmark since August but only the second in nearly a decade.
Boulder County Sheriff’s Office Cmdr. Kevin Parker said that the man—who has not been publicly identified—did not appear to be using any kind of climbing gear, but rescuers were searching the area for any signs of a backpack or gear on Thursday afternoon.
By the time a Denver Post article comes out about the incident later that night, investigators have located and interviewed an eyewitness, so the article is able to provide a bit of additional detail: “The witness believed the climber fell about 1,000 feet from the top of the First Flatiron.”
With that, this essay gets shelved for a spell. It’s not just because the weather has shifted, although the snow on the Front Range makes the Flatirons unclimbable through the winter, intermittent warm days sending rivers of melt down the faces, cold storms stacking new layers of powder over the slush. But more acutely, I realize I’ve been lulled into thinking a solo of the First Flatiron would be a casual endeavor, one that wouldn’t really bring me into proximity of any grave risk. The two deaths, in rapid succession, on the route I’ve planned to climb in the same style abruptly extinguish this confidence, leave me not only shaken but also self-admonishing for having been so cocksure in the first place. I take winter walks through Chautauqua. The snow crunches under my feet, sifts from trailside pine boughs. The Flatirons stand above, their features outlined in icy white. Below, the town of Boulder enjoys its bubble of dreamy calm, a hush of distant traffic in the air, interrupted by an occasional siren belting down Baseline or Table Mesa. During these walking meditations my notebook starts to feel suspiciously similar to the luckless young climber’s selfie camera. Moleskine Courage.
What do we stand to win when our ante is ourselves? The chance to make our finite time feel infinite? The chance to make our finite self feel infinite?
The crux of the First comes in its first hundred feet, where the climbing is particularly thin, slabby and insecure. I stand in the snow at the base—where a second memorial is now tucked in the pines—and visualize the climb. My counterfactual imagination invents a worst-case scenario: I’m not far up the route, approaching the gnarled tree that marks the top of the first pitch where a roped party would typically belay. Immediately below this point there’s a delicate section of friction-dependent slab; the first time I climbed the pitch on rope, this stretch clarified for me that I’d never, ever attempt the route as a solo. There aren’t proper holds, just shallow dishes for the hands and feet. I imagine extending my left foot and placing it in one such divot. I reach farther left with my left hand, where a small diagonal rail supports my left fingertips, stacked in a row. My right hand is similarly stacked in a higher-up dish, and as I go to move my right foot toward my body’s centerline, the left foot slips off. My knees strike the rock first, my elbows a moment after. The angle is low, so I don’t go into full vertical freefall. I bounce down the face. After twenty feet a heel catches and I invert, delivering a rolling blow to my shoulder and an impact to the back of my skull. In my chest a depth charge, a low moan as I land in the talus beside the twin shrines. After my death, my writer-friends will wonder what I was working on in my last days. I’ve kept my preparations for the solo secret, but now they will look in my notebook and see I’ve been planning it for months, getting ready to sacrifice myself for no greater purpose than a literal thought exercise.
I shift my weight in the snow, shake the spectacle out of my head. I return to the trail, the car, the comforts of home.
The winter months pass, long nights, a bomb cyclone that buries my basement windows in snow and leaves me to lurk in the dark like a slumbering bear, and then spring arrives abrupt and clanging and golden. Overnight the Flatirons slough off their snowy coats. Still ambivalent about soloing the First, I go to Chautauqua with two friends, planning to rope up and climb with them as a party of three. This will give me a chance, I figure, to scope the route once more and make a final call. Reassess those dishes and divots, determine whether I can trust my life to them. We spend a long time at the base, not rushing, just racking up and rearranging our packs, sipping water and snacking, enjoying the gorgeous day. The sun dips behind the ridge and the temperature gets perfect, just on the cooler edge of pleasant. The rock won’t be greasy, there’ll be plenty of friction, but it won’t be so cold I’ll get chilly and misinterpret my shivers as fear. Plenty of daylight, light spirits, and for once in my life, I don’t overthink. I know deep in my soul that I don’t need the rope today. So I don’t tie in. I just climb alongside my friends. It’s easier than walking because I get to use my hands, and everything goes perfectly, which means in the end there’s no story at all.
I won’t solo the First again, but not because I hated it. I won’t solo it again because I loved it too much. Since then, I haven’t exactly become a soloist, but I’ve heard the bell-clear siren song from routes a number of times, Johnny Vegas in Red Rocks, the Capstan on Flagstaff Mountain, a few choice cracks in the Sierra, a handful of highballs like Airwolf and High Plains Drifter in various deserts of the West. I am measured and studious, with my books and dictionaries and writing routine and mint tea. I also, when called, enjoy something categorically deadly. Soloing puts me in touch with the multitudes I contain. On insomniac nights I relive the memories of these ropeless ascents, with every detail of every hold seared in my mind in everlasting high resolution, and the perfection of my movements lulls me to sleep. It must sound counterintuitive, but nothing in this world makes me calmer.
The phrase “to risk one’s life” conjures in my mind’s eye a kind of scale, like the one Anubis uses to weigh a heart against a feather. On one of its golden dishes sits your wager, your life; on the other there must be something of equal or greater value in order for the risk to seem worthwhile. What do we stand to win when our ante is ourselves? The chance to make our finite time feel infinite? The chance to make our finite self feel infinite? The satisfaction of saving our own life? Is that payoff enough?
I discovered Anne Dufourmantelle’s work on the university library search engine, under keywords “philosophy” and “risk.” At the time I didn’t look into her biography, just went straight to the primary text. But I’m curious to see what she’s working on now, so I check the regular internet instead of the university database. The first hit is an article from the New York Times, headlined “Philosopher Who Praised Risk Died Trying to Save Children from Drowning.” It reads:
PARIS—A French philosopher and psychoanalyst, known for her work that praised living a life that embraced risk, died last week as a result of following her own bold philosophy.
The philosopher, Anne Dufourmantelle, 53, drowned on Friday as she tried to save two children who were struggling to swim off the coast of Pampelonne beach, near St.-Tropez, France, according to a report from French public television.
Ms. Dufourmantelle was on the beach when the weather began to change and the previously safe swimming area became treacherous. She saw two children who were in danger and leapt into the sea to help, according to France 3, before being caught in the rough surf.
She was pulled unresponsive from the water by two other swimmers, and attempts to resuscitate her failed.
Both children survived.
I’m stunned by how recent the news is: Dufourmantelle died days before the first soloist fell from the First Flatiron. Another search result, an obituary, quotes an English-language lecture she’d once given: “Being completely alive is a task, it’s not at all a given thing. It’s not just about being present to the world, it’s being present to yourself, reaching an intensity that is in itself a way of being reborn.” Having only experienced her work, up until this point, through the veil of translation, there’s something uncannily intimate about reading her words in my own language for the first time. The clarity of it is painful, the poetry self-evident, breaking out of human time and into the mythic. She saw the children, the danger. She saw the swift water. She went in.
Brian Laidlaw is an author of the two collections of poetry, The Mirrormaker and The Stuntman. A songwriter and musician, he has released several albums, most recently This Aster. He writes for outdoor magazines including Outside, Climbing, Alpinist, and Orion. Based out of Moab, Utah, he moonlights—often by literal moonlight—as a rock climber.
Sam Roberts | Longreads | August 11, 2026 | 4,862 words (20 minutes)
This is an excerpt from Are They Dead Yet? by Sam Roberts, which was published on August 11, 2026, by Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.
Tuck Everlasting is a cautionary tale about a family of the same surname who, by inadvertently discovering the proverbial Fountain of Youth, is forced to reconcile with eternity. When I was assigned to write the obituary of the book’s author, Natalie Babbitt, I wondered whether she had continued pondering immortality herself. It turned out she had. Not surprisingly, her own take on eternal life echoed that of the fictional family patriarch, Angus Tuck. “I think that living forever would be a terrible thing,” I quoted her as saying in her Times obituary. “It would be boring, sad and lonely.” Babbitt died when she was 84. But Tuck and her other novels endure as Babbitt’s legacy for readers. So does my obituary, which in 2016 revealed her motivation to become an author: She was inspired to write Tuck, she said, when her four-year-old daughter woke from a nap crying because she was scared of dying. Babbitt had intended to become an illustrator, not an author, but pivoted after taking one writing course in college. She had enrolled because her husband hoped to become a novelist and she wanted to understand the challenges he faced.
Back at the Daily News, obituaries weren’t the best way to achieve immortality. We mostly ran one-paragraph squibs for members of the paper’s family, of printers, pressmen, and their immediate relatives. Instead, like most tabloids, the News thrived on the reported details of murders, assassinations, and suicides. Few news stories generated more of a sensation than death in all its dimensions. No less an authority once defined “news” than the ancient newspaper deliverer—a beloved man known as Bo Gee, who was decades too old to be described as a newsboy—weaving up Second Avenue with a wire shopping cart brimming with Chinese-language newspapers, calling out the headlines as he delivered the papers to Chinese bars and restaurants on Manhattan’s East Side. He began his route in Chinatown, where the papers were printed. Subscribers on Manhattan’s Upper East Side were often a day or two behind the headlines because the last stop on his evening route depended largely on the number of drinks he had finagled from bartenders along the way before he was too wobbly to walk any farther. When a colleague of mine, the columnist Jimmy Breslin (who described him as “a small, thirsty man”), asked him which headlines sold the most papers, he responded unhesitatingly. He didn’t need a public opinion poll or a focus group of readers or a real-time digital analysis of clickbait: Two were surefire circulation boosters. One was war! The other: big guy dies!
Taken separately, obits constitute an individual’s legacy. In aggregate, they can capture the social and cultural currency of an era. Which people are worth remembering? Which values are worth celebrating? How do we measure success and failure, good and evil, achievement and defeat, social rank and professional standing? How many of the one hundred thousand people now immortalized in the periodically printed historical compilation Who Was Who were deemed worthy of obituaries at the time of their death? How many of the more than 33,000 contemporary notables included in the latest editions of Who’s Who will get obituaries when they die? (That the titles of those reference books don’t include question marks suggests that the listings themselves are indisputable, a questionable supposition when the price of inclusion by some publishers seems to be for the “whos” to buy at least one copy of the book. An entry for Michael Fowler Cullis, a former British diplomat, describes his recreation as “writing obituaries for friends.”)
People want to be remembered, and we want to remember them, or, at least, we do. “Obituaries commemorate a life at the point where it is completed by death. Yet the completion is also depletion, in the sense that the life is constructed as meaningful precisely at the point where it stops,” Professor Clare Brant, who teaches literature and culture at Kings College London, has written. “They act as the first version of a biography—sometimes the only one, although Wikipedia has closed the gap with each life story seemingly waiting for a death sentence.” But as valuable as Wikipedia can be, the New York Public Library notes, “Obituaries provide an important tool to researchers by offering biographical information on individuals that may not be readily available elsewhere. In many cases, the obituary supplies the only biographical data extant on a person.” Philip Sutton, a genealogy librarian at the library, told Legacy.com, the self-proclaimed world’s largest commercial provider of online memorials and guest books, that obituaries may reveal the married name of a daughter identified years earlier in the census only by her maiden name; that by identifying an immigrant’s specific birthplace, obituaries can also invigorate research on a family’s roots.
Obituaries are a reminder that when you die, someone else gets the last word on your legacy—or, at least, the first of the last words.
Especially in small towns and midsize cities, local newspaper obituaries bond one generation to the next. By recalling where the deceased went to school and whom they married and who survived them, those obits provide the frames that form a moving picture of continuity, a narrative of cohesion. They describe whether, and how, the departed outpaced their parents in personal and professional achievement, their legacy to contemporary readers, and the promise of their progenitors—grandchildren or great-grandchildren who are still blank slates with the potential to add to the story.
To me, obituaries evoke the heartrending backstories of the characters in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, the unfulfilled promise of Joe Crowell, who got a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated first in his class: “Goin’ to be a great engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died in France. All that education for nothing.” Emily is dead, too, but so consumed by nostalgia—before being persuaded that “live people don’t understand, do they?”—that she descends from the town’s cemetery and wants to return to her past life in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, until the Stage Manager reminds her, “You not only live it but you watch yourself living it. And as you watch it, you see the thing that they, down there, never know. You see the future. You know what’s going to happen afterwards.” “When I think of an obituary, it’s as objective as journalism can be, a story on someone’s life,” Holly Shreve Gilbert, a journalism instructor at Oakland University who was the interim president of the Funeral Consumers Information Society, told Molly Birnbaum of Atlas Obscura. But “hyper-local journalism is dying, and so is the obituary of the local person.” Gilbert added, “Now, if it’s on Legacy.com or Facebook or a blog, we’re basically whitewashing everyone’s lives. We’re all happy. Everyone is happy.”
Well, not everyone.
Obituaries are a reminder that when you die, someone else gets the last word on your legacy—or, at least, the first of the last words. And for all the beloved and respected and cherished and valued that punctuate paid obituaries, don’t forget that families can try to perpetuate irreverent descriptions unilaterally to settle scores when one is no longer in a position to retaliate or respond. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Malcolm declaims of the repentant Thane of Cawdor, who was executed for treason, “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” If the Thane got the benefit of ambiguity, Florence Harrelson of Chelsea, Maine, had no such luck when she died in 2024 and her daughter, Christina Novak, placed a paid obituary in the Kennebec Journal. Wasting no words, the four-line obit read that the 65-year-old Henderson died “without family by her side due to burnt bridges and a wake of destruction left in her path.” It continued, “Florence did not want an obituary or anyone including family to know she died. That’s because even in death, she wanted those she terrorized to still be living in fear looking over their shoulders. So, this isn’t so much an obituary but more of a public service announcement.”
In 2023, Gayle Harvey Heckman took the trouble to announce the death of her mother, Linda Lernal Stull, in her Michigan hometown newspaper, the Three Rivers Commercial-News, even though they hadn’t spoken in 24 years. “As a mother, Lernal was violent, hateful and cruel,” Heckman wrote. “She physically, mentally, emotionally, verbally and financially abused Gayle.” After going into excruciating detail, the obituary concluded, “Gayle and her family forgive Lernal and hope that she has found peace. They also hope to find peace within themselves. Lernal will not be missed by Gayle or her family. They all understand that the world is a much better place without her.”
Blunt isn’t always bad. If writing can be a cathartic, it can also offer an object lesson. In 2015, a nine-hundred-word paid obituary in Maine’s Bangor Daily News (down-easters seem less inhibited about publicly evaluating their kin) began, “Coleen Sheran Singer (born Coleen Sheran Clark) would have turned 33 this August 31, but she died in Lewiston in an unsuspecting suburban professional couple’s home of a heroin overdose on the morning of December 25, 2014.” The obit was written by Singer’s former husband. It detailed her considerable assets—intellectually gifted, creative, and spirited—without concealing her hefty baggage as a woman who was addicted and suffering from borderline behavioral disorder. Brent Singer attributed the life his former wife led to her broken childhood home but blamed her death on Maine’s governor for denying her access to the methadone clinic she had relied on to stay straight.
In 2008, the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming reported that Jim Adams died at 53. Weary of soppy obituaries of patients who had courageously struggled against one disease or another until the bitter end, Adams went through his son to provide an unvarnished premortem verdict on his abbreviated life. And he had no compunctions about belatedly exercising personal responsibility and admitting that he lost his battle for less inspiring reasons entirely: “It was primarily as a result of being stubborn and not following doctor’s orders or maybe for just living life a little too hard for better than five decades.” He did lament, however, that he “was sadly deprived of his final wish, which was to be run over by a beer truck on the way to the liquor store to buy booze for a date.”
In 2019, the family of Joe Heller (not that one) playfully celebrated his life in the Hartford Courant. They described him as “a frequent shopper at the Essex Dump” who “left his family with a house full of crap, 300 pounds of birdseed and dead houseplants.” Heller was so practiced a consummate napper that “there wasn’t an occasion too formal or an event too dour that Joe didn’t interrupt with his apnea and voluminous snoring.” The obituary added, “The family is seeking donations to offset the expense of publishing an exceedingly long obituary which would have really pissed Joe off.” (It then appealed generously for contributions to the Seabee Memorial Scholarship Association.)
The Hellers weren’t kidding. Those paid “obits” aren’t cheap. The New York Times doesn’t accept paid obituaries, but their paid death notices, depending on the edition and the day, cost about $1,000 for a bare-bones nine lines of type and $50 for each additional line, which verbose encomiums and fervent eulogizing can raise into the thousands of dollars. (In memoriam notices in newspapers that wish the departed “Happy Birthday in Heaven” remain a testament to the enduring value of print advertising.) While radio and television have generally fallen short in memorializing the dead, there are blogs, zines, and commercial websites devoted to dying, and personal web pages and online videos have all helped democratize death. So far, though, it’s one area in which even a buzzworthy website can’t always live up to its name (such as when Michael Jackson’s death was announced on MichaelJacksonLive.com).
The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina used to publish brief obituaries of local figures for free—until executives discovered that printing a full page of them daily was costing $350,000 annually for newsprint alone. When the paper imposed a fee, readers revolted; the editors relented in some editions. MyGoodbye.com was started by Stephen Miller (definitely not that one), who grew up next to a cemetery and, after escaping from his bank’s eightieth-floor office in 2 World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, decided to become an obituarist full-time. Legacy.com partners with hundreds of newspapers and thousands of funeral homes worldwide to account for about 70 percent of the deaths in the United States alone. A prototype called EPOCH—Electronically Preserving Obituaries as Cultural Heritage—created by the Orange County, Florida, Library System enabled people to publish an obit online for free. Another website, MyObits.com, also lets anyone publish a free memorial. Facebook even allows users to designate an executor to manage their profile after they’ve personally logged off this mortal coil for good.
While radio and television have generally fallen short in memorializing the dead, there are blogs, zines, and commercial websites devoted to dying, and personal web pages and online videos have all helped democratize death.
Paid death notices have been wielded as much to ward off the living as to get the last word on the dead. In the early 1920s, Audrey Munson, America’s first supermodel, became so fed up with fame that she tried to fake her death by paying to run a phony death notice in her local upstate New York newspaper. Her gambit failed; she was so celebrated that the clerk she approached refused to accept the advertisement because he recognized her. Rudyard Kipling may have done her one better: When a newspaper reported his death prematurely, he wrote to the editor, “I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.”
Six months before Oliver Sacks died of cancer at 82 in 2015, the London-born neurologist who lived in Manhattan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that amounted to an auto-obituary. Sacks was galvanized, he wrote, by the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, who, learning he was mortally ill at 65, penned a short autobiography in a single day in 1776. “I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective,” Sacks wrote. “There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at ‘NewsHour’ every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.” He explained that his shifting priorities were influenced less by passion than perspective: “This is not indifference but detachment—I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future.”
Kelly McMasters, the author of The Leaving Season: A Memoir, started writing her obituary when she was 12; she has refreshed it almost annually since then. Her ritual was inspired by an assignment her mother was given while training as a volunteer at a local hospice. “I usually end up with a gentle accounting of the year, held against all the past ones,” McMasters wrote in a New York Times opinion essay. “I found many of the accomplishments that felt precious one year were hardly worth a mention the next.” Her private accounts produced an album of verbal snapshots, unreachable versions of herself that seemed as good as the dead about whom obituaries are otherwise published. “It seems dreadfully unfair that we wait until after our deaths to write them and never get to read them ourselves,” McMasters wrote. “Writing your obituary while you’re still alive can offer clarity about your life and, mercifully, if you find something lacking, you still have time to revise.”
By inspiring the “Portraits of Grief” series of intimate minibiographies of the victims of 9/11 in the New York Times, the attack by fanatical al-Qaeda suicide bombers on the World Trade Center in 2001 may inadvertently have made the obituary more egalitarian than any event since the Civil War. These 200-word vignettes with thumbnail photographs weren’t standard obits or news stories. Volunteer reporters interviewed families and friends of the victims and the missing to sketch some 2,500 hundred profiles. Overseen by Jon Landman and Christine Kay on the Metro Desk, the portraits were published over nearly five months. “Terrorism rather than the internet democratized the obituary,” Professor Clare Brant wrote. Roy Harris wrote for the Poynter Institute of the project, “The portraits identified one aspect of life—a woman gardening, a man taking his daughter to ice-skating lessons, or perhaps indulging in a fondness for cigars.” The obituarist Nigel Starck said, “Each day’s pages would renew a sense of the tragedy’s scope, while the individual portraits made each person intimately real.” Our exercise in mining the unremarkable found a larger-than-life common denominator, one that challenges the novelist W. P. Kinsella’s conclusion that “the lives of ninety percent of the population are so dull that no one would care in the least about them, the lives of the remaining ten percent are so bizarre that no one would believe them.”
Some of the deaths in those “Portraits of Grief” were preceded by chivalrous acts of courage and self-sacrifice. Those heroics worked their way into news articles. The portraits were not about how people died, not about their last moments of life, no matter how gutsy, but how they lived and what their loss meant to their family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. The gruesome, grisly details were superfluous, unlike an earlier obituary style in which the how sometimes seemed to predominate over the who, what, when, where, and why.
When Louisa May Alcott died in 1888, for example, the New York Times explained in the first paragraph of her obituary, “For a long time Miss Alcott had been ill, suffering from nervous prostration. Last Autumn she appeared to be improving and went to the Highlands to reside with Dr. Rhoda A. Lawrence. She drove from there into town to visit her father on Thursday last, and caught a cold, which on Saturday settled on the base of the brain and developed spinal meningitis.” The first five paragraphs of Teddy Roosevelt’s Times obituary in 1919 left nothing about the cause of death to the reader’s imagination: “His physicians said that the immediate cause of death was a clot of blood which detached itself from a vein and entered the lungs.” In 1892, reporting the death of Caroline Harrison, the wife of President Benjamin Harrison, the Atlanta Constitution described her corpse in clinical detail: “She shows in her emaciation the effects of the long wasting illness of eight months that has reduced her large, matronly figure to a thin, frail form.” Then again, as recently as 2000, the paper, now called the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ran an obituary by Kay Powell of a local church-choir tenor, who had also written a manuscript on the philosophy of religion, beginning this way: “David Robeson Morgan was a brilliant man whose future looked good, until he had a frontal lobotomy in 1947.”
“A writer may bear the same name as the subject of his memoir, but he is hardly the same person,” Robert W. Fuller, the former college president and self-styled dignitarian, surmised in the epilogue to his own memoir. “He has long since morphed into the subject’s successor, and then the successor of the successor.” Bridget Fowler, a sociology professor at the University of Glasgow and the author of The Obituary as Collective Memory, wrote, “The auto/biography as such is under the expressive control of its author and is thus as profound (or simplistic) as he or she is. In contrast, one characteristic of the obituary is that these lives are selected as particularly memorable, distinguished, or newsworthy.” She adds, “The obituary offers the rare accolade of public recognition, the first step toward posthumous memory. Yet it is not just a store of value, it is also a measure of value: the obituary as a biographical form illuminates the social reality of dominance and distinction, whilst only rarely shedding light on the world of subordination.”
The onset of the AIDS epidemic presented editors with a sensitive dilemma: Merely having the virus implied vulnerable behavior—either drug use or homosexuality—that society was far from accepting. In 1986, the fashion designer Perry Ellis died of AIDS at age 46, as stated in his obituary in the Washington Post. In the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, his cause of his death was reported to be viral encephalitis. In early May 1987, Charles Ludlam, a playwright, parody actor, and admired figure in New York’s East Village underground arts scene, withdrew from the New York Shakespeare Festival’s scheduled Central Park production of Titus Andronicus. On May 28, Ludlam’s publicist announced that he had died of pneumonia. The New York Times‘s Jeremy Gerard assumed correctly that the pneumonia was a complication of AIDS, and believed the refusal to acknowledge the disease compounded the tragedy of Ludlam’s death by validating the stigma attached to gay people, who were among its most prominent victims.
As Leah Rosenzweig reported in Slate, for hours Gerard desperately tried to persuade Ludlam’s parents to confirm the actual cause but failed. “They were working-class Catholics from Long Island; as far as they were concerned, their son had died a shameful death,” Gerard recalled. But fifteen minutes before his deadline, the family’s lawyer called back. The Ludlams agreed to confirm the cause. On May 29, 1987, Gerard’s obituary of Charles Ludlam was the first that identified AIDS as the cause of death in the Times, on the front page.
“Obituaries contribute to national myths or collective memories of contemporary heroes by symbolically ‘reflecting what, in death, was most valued about the lives of individual citizens,'” Janice Hume wrote. “An obituary distills, publishes, and thus legitimizes something more abstract than mere facts. It also reveals values, highlighted in the attributes of the deceased, and should be examined not just as an indifferent chronicle but as a commemoration, a representation of an ideal, with its own distinct contribution to the understanding of history. Those ideals, part of obituary coverage, become safeguarded by their publication.”
To quantify those values, Lux Narayan, a social media analyst, conducted a statistical survey of some 2,000 New York Times news obituaries that were published in 2015 and 2016. Not surprisingly, the fields of academics, science, politics, film, theater, music, dance, and art predominated among those deemed worthy. On average, they achieved the thing that made them worthy of a Times obituary when they were 37 years old—athletes more likely in their twenties, politicians in their forties. The prototypical obituary subject lived to be 81, which meant 44 years had elapsed between the accomplishment and, in the cases of the many obscure and quirky characters, their public aggrandizement. “Talk about having to be patient,” Narayan said. In a TED Talk, he explained his obsessive reading of the daily paper over scrambled eggs this way: “If you think about it, the front page of the newspaper is usually bad news and cues man’s failures. An instance where bad news cues accomplishment is at the end of the paper, in the obituaries.”
What were the most common denominators among those obituarized, and what do they suggest society—or, more to the point, the Times—valued? If your name was John, you didn’t necessarily have a better chance of being the subject of an obituary, but it was more likely that a man whose first name was John would appear in one. That’s not so surprising, given that John (along with James, Robert, Michael, and David) has been among the most popular names for American men born in the last 100 years. Narayan was struck by another commonality, though. The language-processing program revealed that the one word that leapt out everywhere was help, as a noun or verb. The most universal value, it seemed, that elevated the famous and not-so into those the Times editors considered worthy of obituaries was how much people helped. “They made a positive dent in the fabric of life,” Narayan said.
For a family member, an obit represents an imprimatur, validation by association, a keepsake that maintains their heritage and, perhaps for a generation, prevents their own legacy from vanishing like a walnut in the batter of eternity.
Journalists understand, or should, that statistical surveys of subjective material are fertile ground for as many question marks as answers. Patrick Nolan, a sociologist at the University of South Carolina, wondered whether the cult of celebrity has blossomed over the last century, as the anecdotal evidence suggests. Has the public become so starstruck that somebodies in less glamorous professions have been overshadowed? One way to measure the trajectory of society’s fascination quotient, he figured, was to enlist New York Times obituaries as a cultural barometer. Nolan’s canvas was every “notable death” that was published in the Times during the entire twentieth century.
“Most striking are the simultaneous increases in celebrity obituaries and declines in religious obituaries,” Nolan and Timothy J. Bertoni reported in the journal Sociation Today. “They document the increasing secularization and hedonism of American culture at a time when personal income was rising and public concern was shifting away from the basic issues of survival. The magnitude of these trends is seismic. While the Greeks may have looked to their gods for guidance and entertainment, we’ve turned increasingly to our celebrities—entertainers and athletes.” After dividing the century into quarters, Nolan and a doctoral student, Timothy Bertoni, randomly selected 20 days from 1900, 1925, 1950, 1975, and 2000 and ranked the professions of the dead by the number of obituaries run.
The number of obits of entertainers and athletes, grouped together, rose, from seventh most in 1900 to fifth in 1925, third in 1950, and first in 1975. By 2000, they remained in first place and accounted for 28 percent of obituaries. In 2000, the researchers didn’t find a single notable religious figure who was memorialized. The category had plummeted from fourth place when the 20th century began to last when the millennium ended. During the same period, the number of obituaries of notable individuals from the fields of business, finance, manufacturing, and industry declined by half. Americans, Janice Hume has written in her study of grief, “value each other and, indeed, value life for collective reasons. They value a long, robust, and full life, a life that is uniquely American, and a life that ensures social preservation. A typical Victorian obituary would carry the statement, ‘in life we are in the midst of death,’ but as this study suggests, at least on the obituary pages of historic mainstream American newspapers, in death we are in the midst of life.” Nigel Starck, too, argues that obituaries provide a glue that bonds society not in grief but in an aspirational reevaluation of our own lives.
“There is nothing inherently gloomy about the newspaper obituary page,” he writes. “Done well, it should capture life rather than wallow in death.” Clare Brant recalled her euphoric reaction to reading of the death of Martin Wells, the grandson of the English writer H. G. Wells, in the Guardian in 2009. He was an 80-year-old biologist with a passion for cephalopods and was also a novelist, painter, and yachtsman. “Though marine biologists don’t have dry lives in a literal sense, and people who love octopus usually have a sense of play, he was really lively,” Brant wrote. “I rejoiced that an academic could have such a full, happy and entertaining life—there’s hope for the rest of us! It wasn’t that I wanted to know him or even to have known him, but I was glad he’d existed, and I still want not to forget the implications of his existence.”
And that was an obituary about a total stranger. For a family member, an obit represents an imprimatur, validation by association, a keepsake that maintains their heritage and, perhaps for a generation, prevents their own legacy from vanishing like a walnut in the batter of eternity. “The greatest investigative piece I ever wrote when I thought I was really important never survived more than a few weeks in terms of being kept around,” said Jim Nicholson, the Philadelphia journalist who regularly chronicled deaths of the common man, the nobodies, as he put it. “But these obituaries, they’re laminated. They’re put under glass. They’re hung on walls or in family Bibles. In fact, they’re even put into the inside coat pocket of the deceased. And, yeah, they’ll be around long after you and I are gone.” Nicholson’s obituaries were indelible. “My words give readers thousands of moments to remember of little lives lived well,” he said. “Perhaps I even gave them the secrets of how to live one well.”
What readers cherish about obituaries, Casey Cep wrote in the New Yorker, is “the opportunity to celebrate one’s own good fortune at still being alive, to keep tabs on death—who it comes for, at what age, and how much we have in common with the deceased—and also to trace an immensely compact narrative arc. So much of the news is ongoing and unsettled, but obituaries by definition have a kind of alluring finality.” In the two weeks after Victoria Chang’s mother died of pulmonary fibrosis in 2015, the Los Angeles–based poet feverishly wrote seventy poems. Her goal: to recast the newspaper obituary to identify what had been lost (“civility, language and the future,” she wrote) and death’s cultural impact on the living. She described writing an obituary as a wake-up call. “This person is dead,” Chang wrote. “You’re alive.”
Sam Roberts, a fifty-year veteran of New York journalism, is an obituaries reporter and formerly the Urban Affairs correspondent at the New York Times. He has hosted the New York Times Close Up on TV and the podcast Only in New York, anthologized in a book of the same name. He is the author of The New Yorkers, A History of New York in 27 Buildings, A History of New York in 101 Objects, Grand Central, and The Brother, among other books. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, New York magazine, Vanity Fair, Foreign Affairs, and Air Mail. Before joining the Times in 1983, he was the youngest city editor of the New York Daily News. He lives in New York with his wife.
People are choosing cremation far more often these days. Open-casket funerals are on a steep decline, along with the professions that allow for loved ones to comfortably view their dead for the last time. For Harper’s Magazine, John Semley talks to Anthony Saldivar, Berri Cooper, Danielle Colquitt, and Hannah Bugos, all of whom competed in the Restorative Art Technical Showcase, “the highlight event of last year’s National Funeral Directors Association convention.” These elite undertakers are highly skilled in what’s known as restorative art, the process by which humans disfigured by grievous injury or disease are made to look like they did in life, so that their loved ones can bid farewell to someone they recognize.
Cooper has dealt with several particularly complex restoration cases during her long career. While we chatted, she pulled up images on her phone of a father who’d been burned so badly in an accident that he was, save for some faintly visible protruding teeth, barely identifiable as a person. She was able to perform a full facial reconstruction on him based on photographs, so that his loved ones could say goodbye to someone who was not only recognizably human, but familiar to them. “There’s not a body where I’ve said, ‘No, I couldn’t,’ ” she told me. That includes the mutilated body of a stillborn baby, whom Cooper embalmed and restored at a grieving mother’s request.
The vanishing of any craft is a tragedy to all who prefer the existence of a thing to its opposite, but restorative art represents more than just a niche domain of aesthetic achievement or a macabre postmortem racket. With its disappearance, we stand to lose a whole way of memorializing our dead: one that might be pricey, unnecessary, and even a little absurd, but only out of commitment to the notion that an occasion as final as death is worthy of pomp and circumstance.
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