The art of the obit - Settle In with PBS News

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[00:00]
A
The obituary is about human beings with all their flaws, with all their pluses, what makes them who they are.
[00:11]
B
Sam Roberts of the New York Times. The new book is Are They Dead? The Art of the Obit. Thanks for speaking with me. I appreciate it.
[00:18]
A
Thank you, Jeff.
[00:20]
B
And I should say the title of the book is a bit of a joke. Obituary writers live by this rule. Make sure they're dead. So that's my first question for you. Has anybody ever slipped past you?
[00:31]
A
Unfortunately, yes. There was one scammer who did just that, Allen Able, sometime years ago. And then finally, when he did die, we ran his obit and said, yep, he's dead for real this time.
[00:45]
B
He was a scammer. What was the goal in trying to die before he really met his maker?
[00:53]
A
Now, I don't think he was trying to die as much as he was trying to get the publicity about being dead, which he wasn't. It's interesting. Advanced obituaries are a fascinating phenomenon in the field of writing obituaries. As I point out in the book, Alfred Nobel actually read his own obituary before he died. And it turned out it was not his obituary, it was his brothers, because his brother had died. And Nobel was so appalled at the way he was depicted in the obituary as this violent maker of dynamite and foster of wars that he wound up endowing the Nobel Prize. So someone said, no one who ever reads their advance obituary is ever the same again.
[01:44]
B
Yeah, that's true. And you start the book with this wonderful contradiction. You've spent more than a decade writing about death, but you say you've been afraid of death for most of your life. So how does someone who has had this lifelong aversion to death end up on the obit desk?
[02:01]
A
Well, I wouldn't say afraid of death as much as coming from a family growing up in Brooklyn where death was denied at all the time. I remember when my dad died about six months later, his sister, my aunt, was asked by a neighbor how he was, and she at best could reply, so. So that was the kind of culture I came from. And I wasn't particularly pleased when the Times asked me to write advance obituaries to help reduce the backlog of people we should have been doing advances of. But then I realized that obituaries are not about death. Death is mentioned in one sentence. And in fact, they are about people's lives. What made them interesting, why they were transformational, what they were emblematic of in terms of transformation and the impact on society and their mini biographies. And that's what makes Them so fascinating. But most of the people I've written about at the Times and mentioned in the book are people I had never heard of. Obviously we do obituaries of celebrities and prominent people and politicians, but there's so many interesting, quirky people who you would just never know had existed. Those are the people I love writing obituaries about the most.
[03:29]
B
How long did it take you to realize and when did you realize that writing obituaries might be one of the greatest jobs in journalism?
[03:37]
A
It didn't take long. Some people think of obituary writing as a dead end at the end of a career or something for neophytes at the beginning. I think it is one of the most coveted positions in journalism. We now have nine reporters at the New York Times writing obituaries, and they get online to be hired for that department. They are mini biographies. They are stories about people's lives. What makes them interesting. And one of the things I discovered, Jeff, in doing this assignment is there really are no ordinary lives. People have impact, each in his or her own way. After 9 11, when we did our series of portraits of grief of the victims of the World Trade center attack, and during COVID when we wrote about those we've lost, we did little obits on people who might ordinarily be considered routine, who we never would have done obituaries of. And the impact they had on people's lives was substantial. As one obituarist said, who would you miss more, your mayor or your mailman? Well, we take a lot of people for granted, and these ordinary people really do have an impact on our own lives. Thomas Carlisle, who is the originator of the Great man theory of history, said himself who was more important, Hannibal, who drove his elephants across the Alps, or some poor anonymous character who invented the spade? Well, I would go with the spade man, who probably had a much greater impact over centuries than Hannibal did. So, you know, these are important things to take into consideration that everyone is intrinsically interesting in his or her own way, and that the collectively, those obituaries reflect what our culture cares about, what we value in people.
[05:48]
B
Another important distinction you make in the book is that obituaries aren't eulogies. Your job isn't to make someone look good. It's to get the life right. You've now written more than 1600 obituaries, is that right?
[06:00]
A
That's about right, yeah. I've buried a lot of people. Although you could say, if anything, they weren't buried, they were elevated for having their obituaries published in the New York Times.
[06:12]
B
So what does getting it right look like?
[06:14]
A
Getting it right is tough because we are human beings and we make mistakes. And the Internet has had a big impact on that because obit will go up on the Internet and literally within minutes we will get emails or messages from people saying, oops, you got that wrong. You left out one of the survivors. He wasn't at that college. It used to be a college, but now it's a university. He majored in some other subject. So the big advantage is, of course, we can correct things very quickly. We. We make it clear that they have been corrected. So if anyone goes to the original source of the original article, they know that it's been updated. But you try to be fair, you try to be accurate, you try to be full. And they are, as you say, not eulogies. They're not encomia, they're not death notices. We try to look at someone's full life, the arc of their life, the trajectory of their life. And Rowe, who's the obituary editor of the Economist, the talks about looking into the person's soul, their essence, how they viewed the world, rather than necessarily how we view them and what impact they had on other people. To me, that is one of the big challenges in writing obituaries. The big challenge is, of course, deciding who gets them. About 150,000 people die every day in the world, and we have room for maybe three or four obituaries. The other big challenge I find is when someone has committed a misdeed or something anomalous in their behavior. How does that fit into the trajectory, the arc of their entire lives? And where do you put that in the obituary? Do you call someone a disgraced former politician? Or do you say that was out of the ordinary, that was not symbolic or emblematic of who they were as human beings and who they were as public officials or what they contributed to society? Those are very tough calls. Charlie Rangel, then the Ways ComEd Ways and Means Committee in the House. First black member, first black chairman of the committee, was censured in his last years in office by the House. Do we call him a politician who has fallen from grace? I decided not to. I thought that was an aberration in his career. And we put that in the fourth or fifth paragraph for that censure. And perhaps one validation of our judgment was that he had gotten reelected by his own constituents after the censure. So those are very, very tough human decisions, and you're bound to be second guessed. But we try and make them as fairly as we possibly can.
[09:14]
B
And compare that to Alan Hevesy, whose corruption scandal became in many ways central to his obituary.
[09:22]
A
Central to his obituary, we called him a official who had fallen from grace, and he fell from grace for corruption, for conflict of interest that very much related to his public office. So, you know, it wasn't something that was tangential. It was something that was intrinsic to his performance as a public official, which, you know, with the rest of his career had been pretty impressive. But unfortunately, that came to dominate. And he was called a politician who had fallen from grace in that headline. And as opposed to Charlie Rangel, who was called a veteran long term congressman.
[10:07]
B
You know, one of your chapters, the chapter title is Whose Life Is It Anyway? And it gets at who really owns a person's story after they die. The family, the public, a journalist. Where do you come down on that?
[10:20]
A
Well, I think if it is someone of public interest, then the public, the readers own it or should own it. There's nothing hidden. When we do an obituary, again, we try and capture the full life of the person. Families are usually cooperative because they want to get that person recognized. It is a last word, if you will, a final word of judgment on that person and what they contributed to society. And, you know, sometimes families ask us to leave things out, but if we think they're relevant, we don't. I wrote an obituary about a prominent philanthropist in New York who had given a lot of money for cancer prevention and research and treatment. I felt it necessary to mention that a lot of the family's money came from the tobacco industry. I thought that was a fair reference. The family did not. But I thought that added some perspective, arguably in favor of the person. Because a lot of people make money from things that we find offensive, but don't give their money away to good causes. And also because in the fullness of the person's life, that said something about context, you know, whether it was out of guilt or altruism or whatever. It's not for me to judge, but I thought it was certainly worth noting. In the obituary that ran online and
[11:52]
B
in print, you say that if journalism is the first draft of history, the obituary is the clincher. It really is the final word. And it strikes me that gives the obituary writer, in this case you, extraordinary power. You are essentially deciding the historical record, what the historical record will say about this person's life. I'm sure you feel the weight of that.
[12:15]
A
You do feel the weight of that. It is not as objective as a lot of people think. We do have to make Judgments about people's value to society, what they contributed, what they may have taken away. So it's not like a news story or it's not like a profile necessarily, where you're being, you know, more objective about the person. You have to make some sort of judgment as to why we are running this obituary in the first place. What was the person's value? What was their impact? How were they transferred? Transformative? How did they affect other people? How did they affect society and its values? I did an obituary of a young man who worked with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he was working on the moon landing. And as it was taking place, just before it was taking place, a red alert light went on in the command center. And he said, don't worry about that. I've seen that before. It's a false positive. And he had to persuade all these senior scientists in a matter of seconds that he was correct. Well, it turned out they believed him because he had the credibility. And the moon landing took off successfully. Nobody ever heard of him. He probably never did anything of greater significance in his life. But as I point out in the book, that made him worthy of a New York Times obituary. He had that impact. We landed on the moon, and it was successful, and it was because of him, even though he remained an anonymous figure for the more than four or five decades that he lived after that.
[14:03]
B
I would imagine one of the strangest aspects of the job is what you mentioned earlier. Writing the advance obituary, pulling back the curtain a bit. It's something that we in the news business do fairly often. It's standard. The Times has. I was shocked to read this. More than 2000 of them sitting on file. So what's it like to call someone's friend or family member and say, we're working on this advance obit? Can you talk to us about this person you know, or love?
[14:30]
A
Jeff? We have about 2,000, and unfortunately, never enough, because people always die unexpectedly, either younger or for some other thing. I had a. An assignment one weekend to do the obituary of Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico. And as I point out in the book, I said to our editor, how come we didn't have an advance of him? And the editor said, well, he was only 75. Well, you know, that becomes a factor in who we do. Advances of 75. 70 is no longer as old as it used to be. Maybe 80s. Certainly 90s becomes more of a relevant factor when we're thinking about who to do. Advances of the families and the people themselves who I interview are usually cooperative. For two reasons. One reason, they're flattered that the New York Times is going to do or planning to do an obituary of them when they die. And these nearly departed people, as we call them, want to make sure we get it right. So they want to give us their side of the story, whether it's something factual, whether it's an interpretation of events, something in their record, something they accomplished that might not otherwise have been noticed. So people are pretty good about that. One of the more interesting interviews I've done with people, John Sexton, the former president of New York University, got a diagnosis that he was dying. Within a matter of months. I took my City University graduate school students, I was teaching a course on obituary as biography, took them downtown to interview John. And it was a fascinating experience because the students were learned so much about writing advance obituaries. And John, I think, in the course of that, learned a lot of things about himself. And the book I dedicate to John, in fact, I say to John the ineffable, who even during his dying period, and he has since lived, thank goodness, even during his dying period, taught us about life and how to live. So those things prove to be very educational, revealing experiences, I think, both for the people who we're writing about as well as for ourselves. And you've got to start off, you know, we sometimes engage in gallows humor, if you will. Perhaps the very title of the book, are they Dead Yet? Is part of that. But you've got to be sympathetic. You've got to be empathetic. You've got to recognize people are grieving and that this, for most people, is the last word, the last public judgment they will ever get.
[17:25]
B
Do people ever try to negotiate their obituaries with you to make sure a certain achievement stays in or a certain chapter of their lives stays out?
[17:34]
A
They try to make sure that they are presented in the best possible light, of course. And we never show advance obituaries to people. They cannot vet them. We fact check them, of course. I wrote an obituary about an editor for a wire service, and it was written. He had an obituary written by a member of his own staff for use, obviously, when he died. And the editor wanted to see the obituary, and the reporter who wrote it said, forget it. You know, you can't do that. You've made a rule that people cannot see their own advance obituaries. And the editor said, oh, come on, you know, it's me. You know, I hired you. And finally the reporter said, look, you know, I can't show it to you. I'm not going to show it to you, but believe me, when you see it, you're going to love it. Well, and the guy, fortunately, is still alive, and he is not seen his own obituary as written by the wire service or by the New York Times, although I have to admit, I used that anecdote at the end of the Times obituary.
[18:50]
B
Are people generally candid in their interviews with you when they know that the obituary. That their interview won't be seen until after they're gone?
[19:02]
A
When we do advance obituaries and do interviews for them, people tend to be more candid in a way, because they're going to have the last word and they're not going to be around to hear a rebuttal to anything they say. And, you know, that makes them often more candid than they would be otherwise. We have an agreement that we don't print anything from those interviews until the obituary itself actually runs. So there is a reason for people to be freer and more. More open and candid in talking to us. And that, I think, is usually a rule that is pretty much followed by people.
[19:44]
B
The New York Times first ever obituary of a woman was back in 1851, and it identified her only as, quote, the wife of Amos L. Lounsbury. No birth date, no maiden name. How did that pattern of erasure play out over the paper's history? And of course, it's not just the paper's history, it's the history of this country.
[20:06]
A
Well, we rationalize, and I think it is, of course, partly true, that women and often members of minority groups were not in a position to hold jobs or become celebrities or prominent people who might ordinarily qualify for an obituary. But there's no question that we overlooked an awful lot of people for one reason or another, and probably at some point, racism, sexism might well have been part of that equation. We didn't do obituaries of Sylvia Plath, of Alan Turing, the physicist. And we have caught up. We have Amy Padnani of the New York Times, one of our editors, started the Overlooked no More feature, in which we have written scores of obituaries, belatedly, about people who we did overlook, who we left out in the history of the New York Times since 1851. So we're making up for lost time, I hope. And currently there are plenty of people of both genders or all genders and. And ethnicities and races to go around, so we don't have to go out of our way to find them. And with luck, we're not Neglecting any of them. On the other hand, you remember about 150,000 people in the world die every day, and we have room for about three or four obituaries. So who gets them is a very subjective decision. And one of the things I try to point out in the book is what goes into that decision making. It's very complex. It's easy to second guess. If I showed you a list of possibilities and you were to pick out the ones who actually made it, chances are you'd be wrong. Chances are I'd be wrong because, as I say, it's subjective. Why did they make it? Obviously, celebrity or politician or a big office holder might, but a lot of people don't. Who ordinarily would have the head of a big law firm, a Wall street investor, when the woman who became the model for Rosie the Riveter or the man who invented a cheerleading school, or the man who invented the remote control device for your television and in effect, created a generation of couch potatoes. Those people will have their obituaries in the New York Times and are mentioned in the book.
[22:53]
B
And one of the points you make in the book that really struck me is that the obituary pages tell us something about the culture of the living. And you cite this study that found that entertainers and athletes, how they steadily overtook religious figures and others during the 20th century. Are they really obituaries? I would imagine that you view them, that they are as a cultural barometer.
[23:16]
A
Well, Jeff, I think obituaries tell us a lot about our culture and what we value as a society. What is it about the people that we write about that we think is worth preserving, worth noting? These are kind of the last judgments on people. And we select people who are intrinsically interesting, who are transformative or emblematic of some sort of transformation, and are occasionally even fun to read about. The book is quirky. The title is irreverent. But we take deaths seriously, obviously. But I think it's true that collectively obituaries do reflect what society cares about. And if you look over time, you can see how that caring, that emphasis has changed.
[24:15]
B
Tell me about one person whose life you encountered through your work that still sticks with you, Someone you still think about.
[24:23]
A
Well, there are a whole bunch of people. Most of the people I write about I had never heard of before. You think we write only about celebrities, famous people. But most of these people are people, as I say, someone who might have invented the remote control device on a television, someone who is the real Aunt Jemima Pancake lady who modeled for the Product of the flower. People who did have an impact. People who, in their own way, contributed something to society, people who, in their own way, made a difference. People often ask me, well, who is your favorite obituary? Very hard, first of all, to even define favorite. But so many people are intrinsically interesting. I wrote an obituary about a woman who climbed almost every major mountain in the world. She was a great outdoors woman. And then she. That would have merited an obituary in and of itself. But it turned out that she died falling down the steps of her house in Colorado, in the Rockies, which made the story almost cinematic, if you will, or theatrical, if you will. You don't want to milk something like that for the publicity, but it certainly struck people. It resonated that this mountain climber, who was very proficient at what she did, winds up dying, falling down the steps in her own house. And, you know, these are the things that reveal what our lives are all about. The serendipity, the. The. What I like to call in a person's life, the rosebud moment. And that's one of the things I try to find in an obituary. Coming from the film Citizen Kane, he mutters rosebud as what is presumably his last word, and we learn that it evokes a sled he had during his idyllic childhood. Well, what is the rosebud moment that makes a life transformative? What was that path that the person switched on? Who is the teacher, the colleague, the military buddy, the friend, the neighbor, who affected that person's life at a certain point? Sometimes early in their lives as children, sometimes much later when they're seniors, but enough to make them merit, at times, obituary, because they did something that was intrinsically interesting or transformative.
[27:08]
B
That's terrific imagery. There's another finding in the book that I loved. It's the. This. It's. When researchers analyzed Times obituaries, one word kept jumping out, and that word is help. And the people deemed worthy of remembering through these obits had, in one way or another, helped other people. After writing 1600 of these, does that ring true to you?
[27:30]
A
I think it does. I think, you know, this is a judgment we make. So, again, it's subjective, but I think we write about people who have made some sort of contribution to society. Obviously, there are people who haven't. And it's very difficult to explain to a family why we ran an obituary of a mass murderer, but their father, who is a country doctor who saved scores of lives, doesn't get an obituary. These are tough calls. The Economist read an obituary of Osama bin Laden and noted that he enjoyed taking his children to the beach and that he ate yogurt with honey. Well, the Economist got lots of complaints from people saying, how could you humanize a figure like that? Well, the obituary is about human beings with all their flaws, with all their pluses, what makes them who they are. Again, it goes back to that question of trying to find the soul of a person, the essence of a person, their view of the world, how they were shaped, why they wound up doing what they did that ultimately merited, if we can use that word, an obituary in the New York Times in print, or@nytimes.com and that's one of the things I try to address in the book, that this is not a simple process. It's a judgment call. And we often second guess ourselves. I had an obituary once that I suggested about the wife of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former senator from New York. And my editor said, well, why do we need to do an obituary about a former senator's wife? And I wrote a draft of the obituary and I explained how important she was, first of all, as a archaeologist of East Asian art, and secondly, that she had a outsized impact on politics in Washington, on her husband's colleagues in the Senate. And the editor looked at the draft and said, okay, you're right, and we ran that obituary. So these are very subjective judgments. You make them one at a time, they can be second guessed. We sometimes change our mind, as we did in this case, and run. Never enough and leave an awful lot of people out, unfortunately. But we try and pick the ones who are most important, most interesting, most transformative.
[30:10]
B
After all these years spent distilling people's lives down to what matters the most, what have you concluded matters the most in one's life?
[30:19]
A
I think what matters the most is how close people came to accomplishing what their goals were in life. Not that many people always sit down and say, okay, my goal is so and so, and I'm going to see if I could reach it. But I think people value what their agendas are and how they treat other people. And I don't think I'm being Pollyanna ish thinking that way. But I think people want to be on their deathbed and say, you know, I accomplished what I wanted to. I lived the best life that I could. I tried as hard as I can. I think those are the things that most people value. They don't always achieve them, of course, but I think that's what most people aim for. Before they're on their deathbeds.
[31:15]
B
Sam Roberts of the New York Times. The book is Are They Dead? The Art of Of the Obit. Sam, thanks again for speaking with me.
[31:22]
A
Jeff, thank you so much for inviting me.

Summary6 min read

Settle In with PBS News — "The Art of the Obit" (August 12, 2026) Host: Jeff (PBS News) | Guest: Sam Roberts (The New York Times), author of Are They Dead? The Art of the Obit*

Episode Overview

This episode delves into the unique world of obituary writing, featuring veteran New York Times journalist Sam Roberts. With over 1,600 obituaries authored and a new book—Are They Dead? The Art of the Obit—Roberts explores what it takes to capture the essence of a life, the ethical calls behind the scenes, and how obituary pages serve as a cultural barometer, reflecting not just lives lost but the values of the living. The conversation busts myths about obituaries, distinguishes them from eulogies, and shares fascinating, sometimes humorous, anecdotes from Roberts' storied career.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Obituary as a Portrait of Humanity (00:00–01:44)

Obituaries focus on "human beings with all their flaws, with all their pluses, what makes them who they are." (A, 00:00)
Roberts recounts instances of people trying to fake their deaths, such as prankster Allen Abel.
The tale of Alfred Nobel reading his own premature obit, prompting the creation of the Nobel Prize, underscores the life-changing power of such writing.
"No one who ever reads their advance obituary is ever the same again." (A, 01:39)

2. Confronting Mortality & the Allure of the Obit Desk (01:44–03:36)

Despite growing up in a death-denying culture, Roberts came to see obituaries as narratives celebrating lives.
“Obituaries are not about death. Death is mentioned in one sentence. And in fact, they are about people's lives...mini biographies.” (A, 02:28)
The real joy lies in chronicling ‘ordinary’ people with extraordinary stories, especially highlighted in the aftermath of collective tragedies like 9/11 and COVID-19.

3. Why Obituary Writing is Journalism’s Hidden Gem (03:28–05:47)

Roberts contests the notion of obit writing as a “dead end”: “It is one of the most coveted positions in journalism. We now have nine reporters...and they get online to be hired.” (A, 03:40)
Every life holds significance: “There really are no ordinary lives.” (A, 03:54)
The obituary desk’s choices reflect societal values, echoing Thomas Carlyle: “Who was more important, Hannibal...or some poor anonymous character who invented the spade?...I would go with the spade man.” (A, 04:40)

4. Objectivity, Judgment & Ethical Dilemmas (05:47–12:15)

Obits aren’t eulogies: "Our job isn't to make someone look good. It's to get the life right." (B, 05:47)
Internet immediacy magnifies errors and demands transparency: “Literally within minutes, we will get emails...So the big advantage is, of course, we can correct things very quickly.” (A, 06:14)
The biggest challenge: choosing who is memorialized, and how to fairly portray complexities (misdeeds, falls from grace).
- E.g., Charlie Rangel’s censure treated as an aberration (A, 08:23); Alan Hevesy’s corruption central to his obit (A, 09:21)
The decision of what to highlight is always subjective and fraught: “You have to make some sort of judgment as to why we are running this obituary in the first place.” (A, 12:18)

5. The Question of Legacy Ownership (10:06–11:52)

“If it is someone of public interest, then the public, the readers own it or should own it.” (A, 10:19)
Ethical tensions arise when family members request omissions: Roberts holds that if information is relevant or illuminating, it stays.
- Notable example: Adding context that a philanthropist’s fortune came from tobacco money (A, 10:53)

6. Advance Obits: Planning for the Inevitable (14:02–17:24)

The New York Times maintains a cache of over 2,000 advance obituaries: “Unfortunately, never enough, because people always die unexpectedly.” (A, 14:29)
Families and subjects generally cooperate, sometimes flattered, sometimes seeking to ‘set the record straight’.
Gallows humor and empathy are essential tools.
Memorable anecdote: John Sexton, facing terminal diagnosis, aided student journalists and learned about himself in the process. (A, 15:19)

7. Negotiation, Candor, and Control (17:24–19:43)

“We never show advance obituaries to people. They cannot vet them." (A, 17:38)
Subjects interviewed for advance obits tend to be “more candid...because they're going to have the last word and they're not going to be around to hear a rebuttal.” (A, 19:02)

8. The Changing Faces—Who Gets Remembered? (19:43–24:15)

Historically, obits excluded women and minorities. The Times’ first female obit (1851) was only “the wife of Amos L. Lounsbury.” (B, 19:43)
"We overlooked an awful lot of people...probably at some point, racism, sexism might well have been part of that equation." (A, 20:14)
The “Overlooked No More” project seeks to redress past omissions.
Who is selected is “a very subjective decision.”
- “If I showed you a list of possibilities...chances are you'd be wrong.” (A, 21:55)

9. Obituaries as a Reflection of Changing Values (22:53–24:15)

Over time, obits for entertainers and athletes have overtaken those for religious figures: "[Obituaries] tell us a lot about our culture and what we value as a society." (A, 23:16)
Collectively, they are “cultural barometers.”

10. Stories That Stay With Us (24:15–27:08)

Roberts is most struck by “ordinary” people with extraordinary stories.
- E.g., an accomplished mountaineer who died from a mundane fall: "You don't want to milk something like that for the publicity, but it certainly struck people." (A, 24:55)
He seeks “the rosebud moment” — the transformative pivot in a life, in homage to “Citizen Kane.” (A, 25:56)

11. “Help”: A Keyword for Lives Well-Lived (27:08–30:09)

Research revealed the word “help” is common in Times obits. Roberts concurs: “We write about people who have made some sort of contribution to society.” (A, 27:29)
Sometimes the selection process is difficult, especially when weighing notorious figures against unsung heroes.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On the soul of the obit:
“The obituary is about human beings with all their flaws, with all their pluses, what makes them who they are.”
— Sam Roberts (00:00)
On the job’s purpose:
“Obituaries are not about death...they are about people's lives.”
— Sam Roberts (02:28)
On crafting history:
"If journalism is the first draft of history, the obituary is the clincher. It really is the final word.”
— Jeff (11:52)
On subjectivity and judgment:
“You do feel the weight of that. It is not as objective as a lot of people think.”
— Sam Roberts (12:15)
On striving for a legacy:
“I think what matters the most is how close people came to accomplishing what their goals were in life...and how they treat other people.”
— Sam Roberts (30:18)
The serendipity of life:
“What is the rosebud moment that makes a life transformative?”
— Sam Roberts (25:56)

Timestamps for Key Segments

00:00–01:44 — Introduction to the art and quirks of obituaries
03:36–05:47 — Why obituaries are the best beats in journalism
06:14–09:14 — Challenges of accuracy, fairness, and depicting misdeeds
10:06–11:52 — Who ‘owns’ a life story after death?
14:02–17:24 — The world of advance obituaries
19:43–22:53 — The history of erasure: women and minorities in obit pages
24:15–27:08 — Lives that linger: storytelling and the “rosebud moment”
27:08–30:09 — The meaning of “help” and judging lives for remembrance

Conclusion

Sam Roberts unpacks the responsibility, artistry, and subjectivity behind obituary writing—revealing it as journalism at its most intimate and impactful. The obit is more than an announcement of death—it’s a meditation on legacy, a mirror for the living, and a call to consider not just how we die, but how we live.

Book:
Are They Dead? The Art of the Obit by Sam Roberts

Guest:
Sam Roberts, The New York Times

Host:
Jeff, PBS News

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Transcript39 lines

[00:00]
A
The obituary is about human beings with all their flaws, with all their pluses, what makes them who they are.
[00:11]
B
Sam Roberts of the New York Times. The new book is Are They Dead? The Art of the Obit. Thanks for speaking with me. I appreciate it.
[00:18]
A
Thank you, Jeff.
[00:20]
B
And I should say the title of the book is a bit of a joke. Obituary writers live by this rule. Make sure they're dead. So that's my first question for you. Has anybody ever slipped past you?
[00:31]
A
Unfortunately, yes. There was one scammer who did just that, Allen Able, sometime years ago. And then finally, when he did die, we ran his obit and said, yep, he's dead for real this time.
[00:45]
B
He was a scammer. What was the goal in trying to die before he really met his maker?
[00:53]
A
Now, I don't think he was trying to die as much as he was trying to get the publicity about being dead, which he wasn't. It's interesting. Advanced obituaries are a fascinating phenomenon in the field of writing obituaries. As I point out in the book, Alfred Nobel actually read his own obituary before he died. And it turned out it was not his obituary, it was his brothers, because his brother had died. And Nobel was so appalled at the way he was depicted in the obituary as this violent maker of dynamite and foster of wars that he wound up endowing the Nobel Prize. So someone said, no one who ever reads their advance obituary is ever the same again.
[01:44]
B
Yeah, that's true. And you start the book with this wonderful contradiction. You've spent more than a decade writing about death, but you say you've been afraid of death for most of your life. So how does someone who has had this lifelong aversion to death end up on the obit desk?
[02:01]
A
Well, I wouldn't say afraid of death as much as coming from a family growing up in Brooklyn where death was denied at all the time. I remember when my dad died about six months later, his sister, my aunt, was asked by a neighbor how he was, and she at best could reply, so. So that was the kind of culture I came from. And I wasn't particularly pleased when the Times asked me to write advance obituaries to help reduce the backlog of people we should have been doing advances of. But then I realized that obituaries are not about death. Death is mentioned in one sentence. And in fact, they are about people's lives. What made them interesting, why they were transformational, what they were emblematic of in terms of transformation and the impact on society and their mini biographies. And that's what makes Them so fascinating. But most of the people I've written about at the Times and mentioned in the book are people I had never heard of. Obviously we do obituaries of celebrities and prominent people and politicians, but there's so many interesting, quirky people who you would just never know had existed. Those are the people I love writing obituaries about the most.
[03:29]
B
How long did it take you to realize and when did you realize that writing obituaries might be one of the greatest jobs in journalism?
[03:37]
A
It didn't take long. Some people think of obituary writing as a dead end at the end of a career or something for neophytes at the beginning. I think it is one of the most coveted positions in journalism. We now have nine reporters at the New York Times writing obituaries, and they get online to be hired for that department. They are mini biographies. They are stories about people's lives. What makes them interesting. And one of the things I discovered, Jeff, in doing this assignment is there really are no ordinary lives. People have impact, each in his or her own way. After 9 11, when we did our series of portraits of grief of the victims of the World Trade center attack, and during COVID when we wrote about those we've lost, we did little obits on people who might ordinarily be considered routine, who we never would have done obituaries of. And the impact they had on people's lives was substantial. As one obituarist said, who would you miss more, your mayor or your mailman? Well, we take a lot of people for granted, and these ordinary people really do have an impact on our own lives. Thomas Carlisle, who is the originator of the Great man theory of history, said himself who was more important, Hannibal, who drove his elephants across the Alps, or some poor anonymous character who invented the spade? Well, I would go with the spade man, who probably had a much greater impact over centuries than Hannibal did. So, you know, these are important things to take into consideration that everyone is intrinsically interesting in his or her own way, and that the collectively, those obituaries reflect what our culture cares about, what we value in people.
[05:48]
B
Another important distinction you make in the book is that obituaries aren't eulogies. Your job isn't to make someone look good. It's to get the life right. You've now written more than 1600 obituaries, is that right?
[06:00]
A
That's about right, yeah. I've buried a lot of people. Although you could say, if anything, they weren't buried, they were elevated for having their obituaries published in the New York Times.
[06:12]
B
So what does getting it right look like?
[06:14]
A
Getting it right is tough because we are human beings and we make mistakes. And the Internet has had a big impact on that because obit will go up on the Internet and literally within minutes we will get emails or messages from people saying, oops, you got that wrong. You left out one of the survivors. He wasn't at that college. It used to be a college, but now it's a university. He majored in some other subject. So the big advantage is, of course, we can correct things very quickly. We. We make it clear that they have been corrected. So if anyone goes to the original source of the original article, they know that it's been updated. But you try to be fair, you try to be accurate, you try to be full. And they are, as you say, not eulogies. They're not encomia, they're not death notices. We try to look at someone's full life, the arc of their life, the trajectory of their life. And Rowe, who's the obituary editor of the Economist, the talks about looking into the person's soul, their essence, how they viewed the world, rather than necessarily how we view them and what impact they had on other people. To me, that is one of the big challenges in writing obituaries. The big challenge is, of course, deciding who gets them. About 150,000 people die every day in the world, and we have room for maybe three or four obituaries. The other big challenge I find is when someone has committed a misdeed or something anomalous in their behavior. How does that fit into the trajectory, the arc of their entire lives? And where do you put that in the obituary? Do you call someone a disgraced former politician? Or do you say that was out of the ordinary, that was not symbolic or emblematic of who they were as human beings and who they were as public officials or what they contributed to society? Those are very tough calls. Charlie Rangel, then the Ways ComEd Ways and Means Committee in the House. First black member, first black chairman of the committee, was censured in his last years in office by the House. Do we call him a politician who has fallen from grace? I decided not to. I thought that was an aberration in his career. And we put that in the fourth or fifth paragraph for that censure. And perhaps one validation of our judgment was that he had gotten reelected by his own constituents after the censure. So those are very, very tough human decisions, and you're bound to be second guessed. But we try and make them as fairly as we possibly can.
[09:14]
B
And compare that to Alan Hevesy, whose corruption scandal became in many ways central to his obituary.
[09:22]
A
Central to his obituary, we called him a official who had fallen from grace, and he fell from grace for corruption, for conflict of interest that very much related to his public office. So, you know, it wasn't something that was tangential. It was something that was intrinsic to his performance as a public official, which, you know, with the rest of his career had been pretty impressive. But unfortunately, that came to dominate. And he was called a politician who had fallen from grace in that headline. And as opposed to Charlie Rangel, who was called a veteran long term congressman.
[10:07]
B
You know, one of your chapters, the chapter title is Whose Life Is It Anyway? And it gets at who really owns a person's story after they die. The family, the public, a journalist. Where do you come down on that?
[10:20]
A
Well, I think if it is someone of public interest, then the public, the readers own it or should own it. There's nothing hidden. When we do an obituary, again, we try and capture the full life of the person. Families are usually cooperative because they want to get that person recognized. It is a last word, if you will, a final word of judgment on that person and what they contributed to society. And, you know, sometimes families ask us to leave things out, but if we think they're relevant, we don't. I wrote an obituary about a prominent philanthropist in New York who had given a lot of money for cancer prevention and research and treatment. I felt it necessary to mention that a lot of the family's money came from the tobacco industry. I thought that was a fair reference. The family did not. But I thought that added some perspective, arguably in favor of the person. Because a lot of people make money from things that we find offensive, but don't give their money away to good causes. And also because in the fullness of the person's life, that said something about context, you know, whether it was out of guilt or altruism or whatever. It's not for me to judge, but I thought it was certainly worth noting. In the obituary that ran online and
[11:52]
B
in print, you say that if journalism is the first draft of history, the obituary is the clincher. It really is the final word. And it strikes me that gives the obituary writer, in this case you, extraordinary power. You are essentially deciding the historical record, what the historical record will say about this person's life. I'm sure you feel the weight of that.
[12:15]
A
You do feel the weight of that. It is not as objective as a lot of people think. We do have to make Judgments about people's value to society, what they contributed, what they may have taken away. So it's not like a news story or it's not like a profile necessarily, where you're being, you know, more objective about the person. You have to make some sort of judgment as to why we are running this obituary in the first place. What was the person's value? What was their impact? How were they transferred? Transformative? How did they affect other people? How did they affect society and its values? I did an obituary of a young man who worked with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he was working on the moon landing. And as it was taking place, just before it was taking place, a red alert light went on in the command center. And he said, don't worry about that. I've seen that before. It's a false positive. And he had to persuade all these senior scientists in a matter of seconds that he was correct. Well, it turned out they believed him because he had the credibility. And the moon landing took off successfully. Nobody ever heard of him. He probably never did anything of greater significance in his life. But as I point out in the book, that made him worthy of a New York Times obituary. He had that impact. We landed on the moon, and it was successful, and it was because of him, even though he remained an anonymous figure for the more than four or five decades that he lived after that.
[14:03]
B
I would imagine one of the strangest aspects of the job is what you mentioned earlier. Writing the advance obituary, pulling back the curtain a bit. It's something that we in the news business do fairly often. It's standard. The Times has. I was shocked to read this. More than 2000 of them sitting on file. So what's it like to call someone's friend or family member and say, we're working on this advance obit? Can you talk to us about this person you know, or love?
[14:30]
A
Jeff? We have about 2,000, and unfortunately, never enough, because people always die unexpectedly, either younger or for some other thing. I had a. An assignment one weekend to do the obituary of Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico. And as I point out in the book, I said to our editor, how come we didn't have an advance of him? And the editor said, well, he was only 75. Well, you know, that becomes a factor in who we do. Advances of 75. 70 is no longer as old as it used to be. Maybe 80s. Certainly 90s becomes more of a relevant factor when we're thinking about who to do. Advances of the families and the people themselves who I interview are usually cooperative. For two reasons. One reason, they're flattered that the New York Times is going to do or planning to do an obituary of them when they die. And these nearly departed people, as we call them, want to make sure we get it right. So they want to give us their side of the story, whether it's something factual, whether it's an interpretation of events, something in their record, something they accomplished that might not otherwise have been noticed. So people are pretty good about that. One of the more interesting interviews I've done with people, John Sexton, the former president of New York University, got a diagnosis that he was dying. Within a matter of months. I took my City University graduate school students, I was teaching a course on obituary as biography, took them downtown to interview John. And it was a fascinating experience because the students were learned so much about writing advance obituaries. And John, I think, in the course of that, learned a lot of things about himself. And the book I dedicate to John, in fact, I say to John the ineffable, who even during his dying period, and he has since lived, thank goodness, even during his dying period, taught us about life and how to live. So those things prove to be very educational, revealing experiences, I think, both for the people who we're writing about as well as for ourselves. And you've got to start off, you know, we sometimes engage in gallows humor, if you will. Perhaps the very title of the book, are they Dead Yet? Is part of that. But you've got to be sympathetic. You've got to be empathetic. You've got to recognize people are grieving and that this, for most people, is the last word, the last public judgment they will ever get.
[17:25]
B
Do people ever try to negotiate their obituaries with you to make sure a certain achievement stays in or a certain chapter of their lives stays out?
[17:34]
A
They try to make sure that they are presented in the best possible light, of course. And we never show advance obituaries to people. They cannot vet them. We fact check them, of course. I wrote an obituary about an editor for a wire service, and it was written. He had an obituary written by a member of his own staff for use, obviously, when he died. And the editor wanted to see the obituary, and the reporter who wrote it said, forget it. You know, you can't do that. You've made a rule that people cannot see their own advance obituaries. And the editor said, oh, come on, you know, it's me. You know, I hired you. And finally the reporter said, look, you know, I can't show it to you. I'm not going to show it to you, but believe me, when you see it, you're going to love it. Well, and the guy, fortunately, is still alive, and he is not seen his own obituary as written by the wire service or by the New York Times, although I have to admit, I used that anecdote at the end of the Times obituary.
[18:50]
B
Are people generally candid in their interviews with you when they know that the obituary. That their interview won't be seen until after they're gone?
[19:02]
A
When we do advance obituaries and do interviews for them, people tend to be more candid in a way, because they're going to have the last word and they're not going to be around to hear a rebuttal to anything they say. And, you know, that makes them often more candid than they would be otherwise. We have an agreement that we don't print anything from those interviews until the obituary itself actually runs. So there is a reason for people to be freer and more. More open and candid in talking to us. And that, I think, is usually a rule that is pretty much followed by people.
[19:44]
B
The New York Times first ever obituary of a woman was back in 1851, and it identified her only as, quote, the wife of Amos L. Lounsbury. No birth date, no maiden name. How did that pattern of erasure play out over the paper's history? And of course, it's not just the paper's history, it's the history of this country.
[20:06]
A
Well, we rationalize, and I think it is, of course, partly true, that women and often members of minority groups were not in a position to hold jobs or become celebrities or prominent people who might ordinarily qualify for an obituary. But there's no question that we overlooked an awful lot of people for one reason or another, and probably at some point, racism, sexism might well have been part of that equation. We didn't do obituaries of Sylvia Plath, of Alan Turing, the physicist. And we have caught up. We have Amy Padnani of the New York Times, one of our editors, started the Overlooked no More feature, in which we have written scores of obituaries, belatedly, about people who we did overlook, who we left out in the history of the New York Times since 1851. So we're making up for lost time, I hope. And currently there are plenty of people of both genders or all genders and. And ethnicities and races to go around, so we don't have to go out of our way to find them. And with luck, we're not Neglecting any of them. On the other hand, you remember about 150,000 people in the world die every day, and we have room for about three or four obituaries. So who gets them is a very subjective decision. And one of the things I try to point out in the book is what goes into that decision making. It's very complex. It's easy to second guess. If I showed you a list of possibilities and you were to pick out the ones who actually made it, chances are you'd be wrong. Chances are I'd be wrong because, as I say, it's subjective. Why did they make it? Obviously, celebrity or politician or a big office holder might, but a lot of people don't. Who ordinarily would have the head of a big law firm, a Wall street investor, when the woman who became the model for Rosie the Riveter or the man who invented a cheerleading school, or the man who invented the remote control device for your television and in effect, created a generation of couch potatoes. Those people will have their obituaries in the New York Times and are mentioned in the book.
[22:53]
B
And one of the points you make in the book that really struck me is that the obituary pages tell us something about the culture of the living. And you cite this study that found that entertainers and athletes, how they steadily overtook religious figures and others during the 20th century. Are they really obituaries? I would imagine that you view them, that they are as a cultural barometer.
[23:16]
A
Well, Jeff, I think obituaries tell us a lot about our culture and what we value as a society. What is it about the people that we write about that we think is worth preserving, worth noting? These are kind of the last judgments on people. And we select people who are intrinsically interesting, who are transformative or emblematic of some sort of transformation, and are occasionally even fun to read about. The book is quirky. The title is irreverent. But we take deaths seriously, obviously. But I think it's true that collectively obituaries do reflect what society cares about. And if you look over time, you can see how that caring, that emphasis has changed.
[24:15]
B
Tell me about one person whose life you encountered through your work that still sticks with you, Someone you still think about.
[24:23]
A
Well, there are a whole bunch of people. Most of the people I write about I had never heard of before. You think we write only about celebrities, famous people. But most of these people are people, as I say, someone who might have invented the remote control device on a television, someone who is the real Aunt Jemima Pancake lady who modeled for the Product of the flower. People who did have an impact. People who, in their own way, contributed something to society, people who, in their own way, made a difference. People often ask me, well, who is your favorite obituary? Very hard, first of all, to even define favorite. But so many people are intrinsically interesting. I wrote an obituary about a woman who climbed almost every major mountain in the world. She was a great outdoors woman. And then she. That would have merited an obituary in and of itself. But it turned out that she died falling down the steps of her house in Colorado, in the Rockies, which made the story almost cinematic, if you will, or theatrical, if you will. You don't want to milk something like that for the publicity, but it certainly struck people. It resonated that this mountain climber, who was very proficient at what she did, winds up dying, falling down the steps in her own house. And, you know, these are the things that reveal what our lives are all about. The serendipity, the. The. What I like to call in a person's life, the rosebud moment. And that's one of the things I try to find in an obituary. Coming from the film Citizen Kane, he mutters rosebud as what is presumably his last word, and we learn that it evokes a sled he had during his idyllic childhood. Well, what is the rosebud moment that makes a life transformative? What was that path that the person switched on? Who is the teacher, the colleague, the military buddy, the friend, the neighbor, who affected that person's life at a certain point? Sometimes early in their lives as children, sometimes much later when they're seniors, but enough to make them merit, at times, obituary, because they did something that was intrinsically interesting or transformative.
[27:08]
B
That's terrific imagery. There's another finding in the book that I loved. It's the. This. It's. When researchers analyzed Times obituaries, one word kept jumping out, and that word is help. And the people deemed worthy of remembering through these obits had, in one way or another, helped other people. After writing 1600 of these, does that ring true to you?
[27:30]
A
I think it does. I think, you know, this is a judgment we make. So, again, it's subjective, but I think we write about people who have made some sort of contribution to society. Obviously, there are people who haven't. And it's very difficult to explain to a family why we ran an obituary of a mass murderer, but their father, who is a country doctor who saved scores of lives, doesn't get an obituary. These are tough calls. The Economist read an obituary of Osama bin Laden and noted that he enjoyed taking his children to the beach and that he ate yogurt with honey. Well, the Economist got lots of complaints from people saying, how could you humanize a figure like that? Well, the obituary is about human beings with all their flaws, with all their pluses, what makes them who they are. Again, it goes back to that question of trying to find the soul of a person, the essence of a person, their view of the world, how they were shaped, why they wound up doing what they did that ultimately merited, if we can use that word, an obituary in the New York Times in print, or@nytimes.com and that's one of the things I try to address in the book, that this is not a simple process. It's a judgment call. And we often second guess ourselves. I had an obituary once that I suggested about the wife of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former senator from New York. And my editor said, well, why do we need to do an obituary about a former senator's wife? And I wrote a draft of the obituary and I explained how important she was, first of all, as a archaeologist of East Asian art, and secondly, that she had a outsized impact on politics in Washington, on her husband's colleagues in the Senate. And the editor looked at the draft and said, okay, you're right, and we ran that obituary. So these are very subjective judgments. You make them one at a time, they can be second guessed. We sometimes change our mind, as we did in this case, and run. Never enough and leave an awful lot of people out, unfortunately. But we try and pick the ones who are most important, most interesting, most transformative.
[30:10]
B
After all these years spent distilling people's lives down to what matters the most, what have you concluded matters the most in one's life?
[30:19]
A
I think what matters the most is how close people came to accomplishing what their goals were in life. Not that many people always sit down and say, okay, my goal is so and so, and I'm going to see if I could reach it. But I think people value what their agendas are and how they treat other people. And I don't think I'm being Pollyanna ish thinking that way. But I think people want to be on their deathbed and say, you know, I accomplished what I wanted to. I lived the best life that I could. I tried as hard as I can. I think those are the things that most people value. They don't always achieve them, of course, but I think that's what most people aim for. Before they're on their deathbeds.
[31:15]
B
Sam Roberts of the New York Times. The book is Are They Dead? The Art of Of the Obit. Sam, thanks again for speaking with me.
[31:22]
A
Jeff, thank you so much for inviting me.