My father always read obituaries to me out loud, not because he was maudlin or morbid, but because they were mini biographies.
A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like those very elderly characters in Muriel Spark's spooky novel, 'Memento Mori.'
The obituaries shot up to the top of my list when I discovered Robert McG. Thomas, the 'Times' obit writer who redesigned its traditional form and added a measure of stylistic elegance.
Every morning, I would actually look at the obituaries before I had breakfast. And as a joke I said if I was not in it, I would have the breakfast.
I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?
I turn to the 'Telegraph's' obituaries page with trepidation.
I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.
Good priests never look for awards and, perversely enough in the clerical culture universe, do not receive many. Like the aged nuns who taught selflessly and nearly anonymously all their lives, these servants of the People of God only get into the papers when their obituaries are printed.
I think the idea of fact-checking, I think the idea that you come up through a system where you know how to cover night cops, and then you go on, and you go on to various beats, including writing obituaries, and you get names right, you know how to spell them, really has some advantages to it.
