He’s Written 1600 Obituaries. What Has He Learned About Life?

Sam Roberts has written roughly 1,600 obituaries for the New York Times, and he keeps a running draft of Rudy Giuliani’s that he updates almost weekly because “it keeps getting worse.” The hardest part, he says, is fitting a misdeed or a grudgeful act into the arc of a whole life. “So with Rudy, you know, he was a gladiatorial prosecutor… a mayor who proved the city was governable… and then after he lost the presidency in 2008, he kind of went off the deep end.” Roberts has to decide how to describe someone who was indicted, disbarred, and sued without letting the headline become a verdict. That tension — between honesty and proportion — is the central craft problem of the obituary writer.

The job is not about death

Roberts did not want the assignment. He came from a Brooklyn culture where death was denied — after his father died, his aunt told a neighbor six months later that Arthur was “so so.” When the Times asked him to write obituaries, he was not pleased. But he realized that obituaries are not about death. “Death is mentioned in one sentence in the obituary. The rest is storytelling — mini biographies.” He discovered that there are no ordinary lives. The question he poses to readers is: who would you miss more, your mayor or your mailman? The mailman touches your life every day in a way you take for granted. That insight reshaped his approach.