Tag: Writing

THERE’S A REASON IT’S CALLED WORK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Perfection: the goal. The end of craft. The essence, completely uncovered. Yet writing is never perfect. Can never be. Not even in its own era, its own place, its own vernacular. So we’re working within a field of potentialities, choosing one aspect over another. Liquids at play. The words themselves will change over time. Energy fields. Northern lights. Sunsets. The mind and flesh, mixing.

Consider a square grid sheet neatly intersected, and then place yourself at the center, where the four quadrants intersect. Take the horizontal line and name it for one continuum, say “highly emotional” at one end and “completely rational” at the other. Now take the vertical line and apply another continuum, say “public” at one end and “private” at the other. As if we could actually measure any such qualities and then scale them on the grid. (We could even consider this as a color field, with white/black as one dimension and red/green or blue/orange as the other.) We could even consider this as a kind of Chinese checkerboard, but stepping outward. The point is, you have to move: to stay at the center produces a muddy gray: nothing unique emerges. The fulcrum remains static and lifeless. As one proceeds away from the center, a kind of balloon or blob may appear on the grid: you’re working somewhere between selflessly emotional and rational, for instance. Or maybe it’s highly focused. In an art – and possibly other areas of life – I see the goal being to move out to an arc from the ends of the horizontal and vertical axis lines – somewhere along an optimal and growing frontier of two qualities. Beyond that, however, destruction awaits. An orchestral conductor, for instance, can emphasize a work’s inner rhythms or its singing lines – or, more likely, arrive at some combination – while counterpoising them with architectural structure or emotional outpouring. The choices determine whether the result is an orthodox repetition of familiar security or an insightful and exciting (and even disturbing) revelation.

So there’s the question of when to stop, on a given piece. When we’ve depleted ourselves. Or when we’ve moved on. Or when it’s more or less accomplished what we set out to do – the less ambitious works having more prospects for success than do those that attempt to soar closest to the sun. Or when the piece moves off into the marketplace, one way or another. Or when we die or grow infirm. Or when we realize we’ve completely missed the mark.

My focus here is primarily on poetry and fiction, although the concepts can be readily expanded outward through all of the arts and probably into a number of other fields as well.

BIAS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Pejorative labels do nothing to advance public discourse. Rather, they’re intended to stifle it. Even worse, they inhibit clear thinking or positive outcomes.

Consider the charge of “liberal media.” Or even “the media,” especially when used in the singular rather than the plural. In reality, American newspapers, magazines, and commercial broadcast stations have long been corporately owned, with the focus on some very profitable bottom lines. Corporations, as the epitome of capitalism, rarely fit neatly into the liberal end of the political spectrum. And so “corporate media” would be far more accurate than the “liberal media” mirage. A closer look would also find most of the editorial pages are of a conservative slant – and nearly all of the political and economic columnists syndicated in the past quarter century have been openly conservative. I’d like to hear of any liberals. In addition, in my experience, the media are highly competitive – there’s no collusion or conspiracy regarding what we’ll cover or ignore, Fox News excepted. For that matter, the media extend into the entertainment media as well – Hollywood, Nashville, Madison Avenue, and Broadway, among others.

Professional reporters and editors, meanwhile, learn to keep their own political and social views out of the way: the goal is to listen carefully and respectfully to all relevant sides of the issue and to present that as clearly as possible, especially in determining what’s new in the event being covered.

I’ve come to the conclusion that those who accuse news organizations and personnel of bias actually have no interest in objective reporting – what they want is bias, of their own right-wing persuasion or even more blatant propaganda. Ideology, rather than fact. The truth be damned, in their hearts.

Perhaps nothing should be more telling than Spiro Agnew’s rabid attacks on a free press, especially when we consider he had every reason to keep reporters off the track of his own criminal actions – and those of his boss, Richard Nixon, all the more. All the while, we covered his attacks on us verbatim and uncontested – had we been anything like he accused us of being, his words never would have seen the light of day, or blasted by critical comment as he spoke them.

If anything, I think of all the years when I willingly suppressed my own convictions – and the price that’s imposed. At last, finally out of the trade, I can truly speak and write freely.

LONG-DISTANCE MEMORIES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In the email age, the personal letter has become a cultural artifact. Here’s what might be an example from someone or another wandering, perhaps in a private desert of Sinai.

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Greetings on this sunny but nippy Valentine’s Day! How much nicer it would be to still be abed, next to you, both of us pleasurably sated and, well, how do you like your coffee? (A local roaster makes a savory version it markets, tongue-in-cheek, as Charbucks – “You told us you like it dark.”) But now, does that mean I have to untie those silk scarves? Or go find those tiny keys again? (Dream on, old man!) Here I am, on the first full day of my fifty-first year (gads, even saying that feels a bit like coming over the first crest on the Cannonball wooden coaster at Canobie Lake!) trying to recover from another grueling double-shift Saturday at the office – the weekly 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. no-letup newspaper editor’s nightmare. So I decided to stay in from worship this morning to try to catch up on some personal affairs, including setting down that letter I’ve been composing in my head the past several weeks – and which, now that I’m at it, I can’t even begin! Which thread should we pursue first? (Fact? Or fiction?) Yikes!

Suppose we should start off by saying how much I’ve once again enjoyed all of your confessions of the journey of the emerging psyche. One of the remarkable things you are doing is giving voice to experiences in a rite of passage for a generation coming of age but who remain so incredibly tongue-tied.

One of the incomprehensible elements is the psychological pain so many teens and young adults in America carry – this, from a generation that has received more physical comforts and leisure than any other in history – food, education, fashionable clothing, shelter, cars of their own. You admit the “emotional demons, trying to survive in the face of my fragile nerves and emotions.” I wonder how that involves the essential nature of being a creative person, someone drawn to the arts, who craves a deeper experience and more fulfilling explanation of life than the material/materialistic surface can ever provide – and how much reflects a very serious and deep breakdown in American society itself, one in which the pursuit of individualism at all costs and the ever-accelerating accumulation of more and more wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands simply leaves fewer openings for most of us to come together as meaningful community. Positions that once allowed genuine opportunities for decision-making and personal expression – like the local bank president or newspaper publisher – are now just mid-level bureaucrats. And physicians and surgeons are just beginning to be sucked up in this process, thanks to HMOs or hospital conglomerates. (As one was recently quoted: “I used to be a physician. Now I’m just a health care provider.” Or as I sometimes say, not entirely in jest: “I used to be a newspaper editor. Now I’m a copy processor.”) The field – and life opportunities – have certainly changed since I set forth, and not for the better, I fear.

So pains, yes.

Wish you were here.

30

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Sometimes it’s hard to believe how much has changed since I entered the field of journalism four-and-a-half decades ago. Even as a high school student editor, I was engaged in a craft that was pretty much as it had been for the previous eight decades, in the long shadow of the introduction of the Linotype machine. We could see ourselves rooted in an even longer tradition of newspapering arising in the handset type era before that. Think of the New York Times dispatches during the Civil War. Printing was still mostly by letterpress, even though the newer offset method with its superior reproduction of photographs was making inroads. Every other week, I would trot down to our printer’s with our latest round of stories and pictures, get correction proofs a few days later, and then release the edition for publication.

We were quite limited in the typefaces available to us. I wanted what was then an elegant new typeface that our shop didn’t own — Times New Roman. Hard to believe how ubiquitous it’s become, or how much further we’ve come as well. But he did have Caslon, which became one of my favorites — in part because of its use in the Sunday editions of the New York Herald Tribune. And Bodoni, in part because of its indestructible nature, was the standard headline choice; try finding it on your computer selections these days. Photos were another matter altogether, as were student photographers. Polaroid shots were a radical leap into the future, and usually far more reliable. Polaroid?

Writers, of course, used typewriters. Not just reporters, but almost everyone except for the select few writers who could still write in longhand and have a secretary or typist service transcribe the results. Secretaries? Typewriters? Typists? And what often astonished me was how antiquated the typewriters in most newsrooms were — clunky old uprights, unlike the elegant (and electric) IBM Selectrics I’d see while passing the local jeweler’s, where they were rarely used. (Unlike those of us who were writing for a living.) The Selectrics, I might add, came into newsrooms later, only with the advent of text scanners, which was a huge setback for the written word. But that’s another rant.

Typewriters introduced their own traditions, especially on deadline. Reporters would finish the first page of a story with the line, MORE, and then begin their next page with a slug line for the story, say CITY HALL, followed by the notation, TAKE ONE or ADD ONE, and then continue. This would go on for however many sheets of paper were needed until the story was finished. And then the reporter would add the line: 30. Perhaps as — 30 — or #30#. But always thirty.

And that’s even without mentioning the carbon copies. (The what?)

We can argue where that tradition began, but it was universal in the trade. If the reporter was working on a breaking story, the first page could be sent to the copy desk, be edited, and even sent to the composing room while the rest of the story was being drafted. A headline could be written and set in type, for that matter. Minutes counted. The first part of story could even be set in hot lead type while the reporter was working toward the ending.

Editors, meanwhile, would be writing headlines using an elaborate tradition of their own. These were all valued skills. And the result mattered.

Sometimes, I can almost smell the newsroom where I became a professional, thanks to Glenn Thompson. Or his advice about keeping a journal. Or some of the others since. Still, it’s hard to believe how far I’ve come over the years.

These days, a news story comes as a single take. A computer file you scroll through. We paginate on a large computer screen, designing a page for publication. All of the highly skilled typesetters, compositors, engravers, proofreaders, and more I admired — and who provided me a safety net — are long gone. Am I getting misty?

There’s an additional reason. When it’s come to my professional career in journalism, the time has come to write:

30

WILL THE REAL ME PLEASE BRAND UP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Branding, we’re told, is everything. It’s not just marketing, or even just a product. It’s the whole lineup. A slogan for differentiating one Big Box Store or high-end boutique from another (including everything inside). Even academia wants a label as a way to file a writer or artist away for easy reference, however awkwardly into one slot or another. It’s ultimately a word game, with or without an actual referent. But what if you’re a misfit, as many truly are?

In literature, the labeling relates better to those who stay within a genre or stick to a manifesto or particular technique or remain in a specific locale – an Oklahoma gothic mystery crime writer, for example – than to my favorites, especially those whose work ranges over many subjects and forms and continually grows. Likewise, I’m bewildered by how often the labels applied to them are downright erroneous, if not simply glib. Or matches one part of their output while ignoring all the rest.

This turns up repeatedly when I attempt replies for those who wish to pigeonhole me. I do what I do. The writing goes where it goes, and the revisions follow. I try to be faithful. So far, I’ve been a part-timer and non-commercial. Neither by choice, but both by fidelity. My opportunities for literary writing (in contrast to the daily journalism that’s paid the bills) have never been that easy or as sustained as I’d wish. I’ve envied those who set out knowing the direction they would pursue for a lifetime, those whose work presents a continuous focus and tone. Especially those who mature as they progress, rather than repeating a facile formula.

Looking back over my poetry and fiction from across the years – and, for that matter, across the continent – I’m struck by the ways so many of the pieces differ, at least outwardly. How varied the subject matter and approach. Here I keep intending the plainspoken, direct, clearly focused piece, and keep winding up with Mixmaster compounds and distillations. Maybe my mind’s rarely that unified; instead, a multitude of mental and emotional activities have kept occurring simultaneously and the most I could hope for is some convergence. Besides, so much of my writing has arisen in some opposition to my daily employment, with all of its own dulling repetition – my writing keeps veering toward the “experimental” fringe, if only in reaction to the daily grind of news stories and headlines. Or, in the past decade, obituaries. Through much of my adult life, I’ve felt torn and uprooted, from Ohio and Indiana to the East Coast and then Washington State and back again. To say nothing of my love life and social environment. The nature poems stand in contrast or discord with the police blotter love poems or, in turn, with my current home setting. That, before I even consider my fiction or the genealogy or Quaker expressions.

(Have I performed the daily journalism to pay the bills while I pursued my literary endeavors? Or had I pursued the literary work as a way of keeping my journalism skills sharpened? What started as one wound up the other, and then shifted back again.)

The writing, in turn, has been an attempt to bring some understanding to all the eruption I’ve experienced. The turns in the road, the setbacks, the advances. A quest for understanding and, if not clarity, some meaning or permanence. I tend my personal journal because I forget so much, and often record observations I will not comprehend until years later. Am baffled, because I have yet to define my mission with a label that sells. Write, then, to discover myself in this morass.

Still, I’m open to suggestions. If you can.

LOCAL, LOCAL

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Ever since Watergate, daily newspapers have devoted more and more of their resources and attention to what they consider local news. Editors and publishers look at surveys where readers say the want local, and decide that’s what we’ll give them – at least until the news business tailspin.

Never mind that the readers’ definition of local news might be quite different from what happens at city hall or even the school board. Or that what happens in one town holds absolutely no interest to the readers living in 99 other localities.

In fact, most of the time, there’s nothing more boring than local news.

When Thomas Jobson led the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey, he relied on a different definition – not “local news,” but “news of local interest.” And so a Mike Royko column out of Chicago just might run on the front page. Circulation at Jobson’s paper soared, while at least one of its neighboring rivals withered.

I’ve taken the lesson well.

FOUR MEASURES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

There are many different definitions of what makes news, even among journalism professionals. These frameworks can lead to quite divergent ideas of what should or shouldn’t go into a given newspaper or newscast, much less out on the front page or at the top of the hour. The expectations can definitely shape the voice and tone that emerges.

The one standard I’ve come to rely on came to me via my mentor, Steve Kent, from his days in Albany, New York. There, a story was judged on four measures: whether it’s accurate, informative, entertaining, and useful.

Accuracy, of course, would include fairness. Informative would likewise include being new, something not widely yet known. Entertaining would often mean well written rather than amusing, at least for most serious events. And useful keeps the readership’s needs in mind.

Try it yourself, next time you’re opening the pages or tuning in to the newscast.

AN ANNUAL PRACTICE, A SPECIAL YEAR

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

I don’t know how far back it started, this custom of drafting an annual memo to myself reflecting on the previous year and outlining my ambitions for the next. The practice has somehow included a review of my journal entries covering the last 12 months, the writing of my Yule letter to family, friends, and colleagues, and the revision of my monthly to-do master lists for the coming year. (You know, the one that includes “renew driver’s license,” “call for firewood,” “schedule annual physical,” and other items that too easily fall through the cracks.) The memo’s continued, even after my wife and daughters fired me from the holiday letter itself, arguing they could make it more creative or at least more interesting. Alas, many of our correspondents have agreed. And, reluctantly, so do I, even while trying to hold it to a single page, if we can. Still, I think the annual review is spiritually healthy. We have a similar practice in Quaker circles called the State of Society Report or, as I prefer, the State of the Meeting Report, and it helps us record our strengths and weaknesses. Besides, I’ve never been convinced of the value of New Year’s resolutions, which usually seem to be recipes for failure. Much of my past decade has been an extended repetition of trying to balance home and family, the office, Quaker activities, literary efforts, some kind of physical exercise and personal care, and always coming up short.  With the to-do lists, that simply meant putting off some projects for another year or two. And then 2012 hit with a vengeance.

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As I noted to myself at this time last year, 2012 was to be a time of transition. Even so, what’s unfolded was nothing like I’d mapped out. Rather than laying the foundation for a traditional plunge into retirement, I instead accepted the company’s abrupt buyout offer and quit full-time employment. This wasn’t retirement, per se, but it did liberate me from much of the escalating tension at the office while opening up more time for all those other efforts. And, as the horoscope predicted, 2012 turned out to be a year of unanticipated surprises. And yes, just before that, at the end of 2011, I leapt into a project that had been on the backburner for months – several projects, actually – beginning with the launch of this blog and extending into Quaker writings and presentations. Jnana’s Red Barn has allowed the release of much of my backlogged writing, especially on the creative non-fiction front, and led to the addition of three related blogs – As Light Is Sown, for lengthier Quaker theological work; Chicken Farmer I Still Love You, for lengthy down-to-earth chapters from book-length projects, beginning with the holistic money workbook; and the Orphan George Chronicles, for my genealogical research narratives. In essence, by the end of 2014, these will contain the equivalent of at least a dozen original books. And yes, it’s become far more time-consuming than I had envisioned.

The year began with the climax of the first-in-the-nation presidential primary and the buyout, which came about abruptly. February and March turned into a period of retreat, decompression, and release as I hunkered down without the required daily commuting. My wife was quite supportive while I indulged in a reading orgy, adapted her old laptop for my online connection (my PC on the third floor has no Internet connection), and resumed poetry submissions after a five-year hiatus. I engaged in a more balanced lifestyle and diet, with regular exercise and early-morning rising. Wednesday afternoons we walked to the Barley Pub for live jazz guitar and a microbrew. How civilized it all seemed, however briefly!

Purchasing an entry-level Kodak digital camera (seriously on sale) in April has allowed me to finally indulge in a pent-up passion for photography. After all of these years of being dependent on other photographers, I’m recording the ways I view the world in so much of its quirkiness. But by May, my goal of working one or two shifts a week as an on-call editor began escalating to three or the maximum four. The money’s helped, of course, but I found myself frustrated in my desire to establish a daily and weekly rhythm of living. Summer’s swirl included a delightful overnight trip to Rutland, Vermont, on a Groupon deal, soon followed by the week I led a five-day workshop at Friends General Conference at the University of Rhode Island and another week at New England Yearly Meeting of Friends at Bryant University, also in Rhode Island. In addition, a Christmas present finally kicked in – a season pass to an oceanfront town park in Kittery, Maine, and swimming sans lifeguard, tidepooling, basking, and photographing from its pristine shoreline. And that’s before we get to the rest of the household. The season also brought emotional closure on some lingering deep-history as I learned of the deaths of a close friend from the Baltimore years, an event more than a decade ago, at age 51; my two mentors from Indiana University, the husband-wife team of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom; a high school colleague in February; and more. Somehow, these culminated in the appearance in August of my first independently published chapbook, Harbor of Grace. The newly freed time prompted me to accept positions on Dover Friends Meeting’s Ministry and Worship committee and New England Yearly Meeting’s Ministry and Counsel committee, which I now see are going to require more attention than I’d anticipated. Still, they dovetail nicely. Autumn included a four-hour bout of Greek dancing followed, 2½ months later, by surgery. In between, we had a delightful visit with my landlords from the Yakima years, a brush with Hurricane Sandy, which was largely only stiff gusts here, and (finally!) the replacement of the roof on the kitchen and the barn. So I end the year still hoping the establish that rhythm and direction, but no doubt much closer to actually accomplishing it.

*   *   *

Full retirement comes in February, and the pension conditions demand the end of any newspaper work on my part. Since I see this change as an opportunity to focus more fully on the Real Work (in Gary Snyder’s marvelous phrase), the matter of establishing a realistic system of time management is essential — I have no desire of simply drifting. I want to the newly opened 45 hours a week as being released just for more writing-revising/submissions/schmoozing but rather for time with my wife, house and garden projects, exercise and day trips, socializing, reading, meditation/prayer, Quaker work, and similar lines.

I had wondered about establishing “regular office hours,” but that pushes me back toward the writing-revising/submissions/schmoozing trap  I hope to control. What might make more sense is to slot in blocs of “project time” to be rotated as necessary among house, garden, travel and hiking, writing, reading, and related projects. Thus, I could piggyback two or three blocs, as needed, say for a day trip. And, as the year ends, that approach seems to be making great sense.

*   *   *

And that’s how it goes. Perhaps this puts some of my earlier postings in perspective. Perhaps it will also encourage you to a similar personal reflection. Maybe I’ll even get around to attempting an alternative version, looking at things I did wrong or badly or failed to address at all. Hmm. Even so, what has surprised me is seeing how much actually happened in a year where I often felt put on hold. And that’s been a special blessing.

EDITING OBITUARIES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 56 Comments

I never intended my professional career to end up with editing obituaries. “Who did you offend?” my colleagues wondered as I was scheduled to the shift week after week. Yes, it’s a job I could have done straight out of high school, forget the university honors or political science degree and urban studies certificate or my writing skills as a novelist and poet. It’s an almost paint-by-the-numbers task, converting the text families or funeral home directors fancy into a format my employer demanded (at least until recently) – and I was caught in the middle. Yet, make an error in an obituary, and the family remembers for decades, so precision is essential. On top of it, many nights are pressed for time – I needed eight minutes, minimum, for the actually editing, but had only six or even four, interrupted by phone calls. Mistakes will happen. Then it’s on to do the paginating, the puzzle of fitting the obits around the advertisements on the page and sending it on to the presses. Again, there’s no room for error – they’ve already been cut to specification.

Much of the work is repetitive. “WWII” becomes “World War II,” the year after a date takes a closing comma, as does the state after a city, and there’s a hyphen in “great-grandchildren” – these are things few people do in their submissions. Others turn up with alarming repetition: “formally of” a town, rather that “formerly,” or “internment” or rather than “interment” will take place. Things I must fix before getting down to the basic form itself.

Then there are the out-of-focus portraits, made worse by electronic submission. Nothing can make a bad photograph any better, but nobody will be convinced of that. They’re upset if you won’t run it, so you do and let the chips fall where they may.

I wasn’t alone in criticizing my newspaper’s obituary policy. For a long time, we charged a flat fee for a services section at the end, and considered the rest a news story, albeit limited to two hundred words. For many readers, however, the news interest is in knowing where to go for the calling hours or memorial service. The life story and family members are of more interest to the family scrapbook than to the general readership, and therein lies the friction.

What many really want to see in print is a eulogy – the funeral oration or at least an encyclopedic history of the deceased and family, where the tone is more addressing the deceased than the public. In contrast, journalism, as in a news story, demands “Smith” on the second reference – or in the case of an obituary, “Mr. Smith” – not “Joe” and not “Mary.” We’re not interested if he married “the love of his life,” since that cannot be corroborated, only the marriage date and location. We don’t use euphemisms such as “passed away,” but stick to “died.” Never mind the family’s desire to say she “went to spend eternity with her Lord and Master,” “quietly slipped into spiritual abyss,” “went home” or “to her heavenly home,” or that he “ventured forth to the Happy Hunting Ground” or “sensing a favorable tide, he set out on his final voyage” (what? The body was floated out to sea?). Paraphrasing the Bard, we’re not here to praise Caesar, but to tell the world he’s dead. Nor are we here to be cute or clever. When the submission includes phrases like “beloved wife” or “loving father,” I recall a Brethren minister declaring she’d never again do another funeral for someone she doesn’t know, with its implication of having been burned by the gap between some strange family’s projected image and its underlying reality. Then there’s the cliché, reminding me of those personals ads that say nothing insightful – “enjoyed most spending time with his family.” Doing anything in particular? Or does the family remember nothing? “She will always be remembered,” although people will forget – quickly. Better to admit, “She is remembered,” and leave it at that.

The out-of-state submissions are often puzzling. Sometimes, the only connection to our circulation area and its readership is that the deceased was born here or has a grandchild living here. Often, no mention is made. I think of the places I’ve lived and know I wouldn’t have my obituary submitted there – not even for the hometown where I lived for two decades. But that’s my own perspective.

Family-submitted obits are often the worst, and not just the ones delivered in nearly illegible handwritten script. There are additional delays and often long-distance phone calls while attempting to confirm the individual’s actually deceased. Without a funeral director’s assistance, the family often makes mistakes that will require later corrections. Should I mention the difficulty of trying to decode tangled syntax? Or one woman trying to call in her own obituary and offended that I wouldn’t accept it? “You’re not dead” seeming to her to be not an issue.

I’d rather we run them as classified advertisements, as the larger papers do. Pay for what you want. If you want to name all of the spouses of the children and grandchildren, you get to, unlike our longtime policy. My fear was that under our traditional practice, we were only offending people, especially those expecting something more for free. As it stood, nobody was really happy with this – not even me – and it’s too easy to lose a longtime subscriber’s loyalty here.

Sometimes, people go to great lengths not to include the age of the deceased, and it’s not always for women. He was a war veteran or they were married for fifty years, and that’s the best you can do. At times, especially for elderly people, the family is uncertain of the birth date, year, or place.

As I go, I also find myself reading between the lines. Signs of family tension are hinted when parents or wives are not mentioned, or there are children whose location is apparently unknown – or are listed as nothing more than “children.” Sometimes a spouse is reported living in a separate town or city, and I’ll leave that in. A sister writes from another state to request a copy of the obituary, and I see she’s not listed among the survivors. The ex-spouse and her children are named before the current wife, and his children with her are not named. As one small-town police officer told me, his department was never called out to a disturbance at the monthly New England contradance – unlike weddings and funerals, where drunken brawls break out. New Hampshire is, by most measures, a conservative state, and yet I’m struck by the number of families that want to name same-gender couples among the survivors or by fundamentalist churches having funerals for members survived by live-in companions. Between the lines, the changing social fabric becomes apparent. Listening to the police radio scanner, I’ve quipped that someone is a “live-in girlfriend” until they’ve had two kids together, and then she becomes a “fiancee.” But what does one make of “his fiancee of twenty years,” as if that’s an honor? The legal distinctions are blurring.

Occasionally, we come across a memorable description, a tellingly honest detail. “He hated weeding” is one of our favorites. Quickly, we know the deceased gardened seriously, and can sympathize. This is reality. As is the unintentional confession, “She enjoyed watching television and playing bingo,” as her major accomplishments.

I’ll admit finding the deaths of infants emotionally difficult to handle, especially in the confines of our format. Sometimes a family’s financial poverty is apparent, or one sees that it has lost other children, or even that the couple saw the child as a kind of fashion accessory deserving a celebration at a local nightclub. In contrast, I recall the experience Penny Armstrong tells in A Midwife’s Story, after losing the first child in more than a thousand Amish birthings, and the unexpected support she received from the funeral director. I feel grief and anxiety, too, handling obituaries for youths the ages of my own stepchildren – a parent’s awareness of the perils they face daily – and am grateful we’ve not had to conduct such a memorial service in my own congregation. On the other end, as we’re reminded, the death of an old person who has served well is no tragedy and can be an occasion for celebratory remembering.

Regardless of whether an obituary fills only half of one column or spills across three, there’s a basic tension between a family’s perspective and that of the editor or reader. For the family, it’s the only obituary of importance – and offense is easily perceived, especially in any comparison to the others, which is the reason for the tight formatting in the first place. One person has more siblings than another, for beginners, or more education or military service, for another. Never mind there are another thirty obituaries that day, and not all of them can be at the top of the page or have a usable photograph. (I’m repeatedly amazed by the out-of-focus shots families provide, without realizing the image cannot be improved.) The reader, in contrast, scans the page; few read every obituary; most turn only to people they’ve known.

Having genealogy as a hobby provides me with other insights into obituaries. I wonder what someone reading this fifty or a hundred years from now will be needing. The location of the hospital, for instance, or the telling detail. My wife and stepdaughters wonder what vanity prompts people to want to proclaim an individual’s accomplishments after the fact, arguing that those who are interested already know them. But I respect the concept of an eternal Book of Life and the human desire for one’s existence to add up to something meaningful and good. That is, the obituary turns into a quest for meaning in life, though I am among those who believe that search belongs elsewhere. Even so, over the decades, the structure and tone of obituaries have changed, and for those of us seeking clues into the personality of our ancestors, these particulars can be priceless. There was a time when families recorded a person’s parting words or when visitors coming from a distance were listed. Sometimes it’s simply high-blown language or a courtly turn of phrase. Even the boilerplate selected can be telling, as in one saying she was always a great beauty, even in her old age. The researcher becomes frustrated when the parents or place of birth are not listed. As an editor, I chuckle, seeing grammatical or obvious reporting errors I’m constantly fixing today while cursing a widespread decline in literacy.

There’s one exercise I’d like to commend – one I first heard about as an assignment for high school students, and something one might try with teenagers in religious education classes or retreats. It’s writing one’s own obituary. What would you like to see as your life accomplishments? How do you identify yourself and your surroundings? What is most important to you? This procedure can be a tonic to a society that celebrates youth and celebrity; instead, this attempt embraces the underlying mortality and lifts up the central values one wants to pursue in the conduct of one’s life. I think of reporters coming back from the assignment of updating obituaries prepared in advance for prominent citizens; inevitably, they tell everyone in the newsroom how delightful the conversation was.

In all of this, I try not to disclose that my own faith discipline discourages the use of calling hours and urges simple burial and memorial services, rather than elaborate funerals. If the coffin is in the room during the service, its lid is to be closed. I am one who finds the old funeral hymns to be far more beautiful and moving than any Christmas carol. When I look at an obituary, I would rather it proclaimed, like the hymn, “This is my story, this is my song,” while demonstrating the ways that life actively went “praising my Savior all the day long.” I might even close it with an altar call. But there are lines I don’t cross in a professional career. I wait for the other opportunities.