Decency is not news. It is buried in the obituaries, but it is a force stronger than crime.
When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.
I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.
You know the Greeks didnt write obituaries, they only asked one question after a man died, ‘Did he have passion?’
There's a magical part of it (writing obituaries), too, which is you're trying to breathe life back into someone who has just died. You're trying to conjure them up.
Obituaries are like near-death experiences for cowards.