EYDER PERALTA, HOST:
It's a task that many of us have done or will do, writing an obituary. But it's Sam Roberts' job. As an obituary reporter for The New York Times, he's written more than 1,600 of them - the famous, the infamous household names and unsung heroes. He's now written a book about this work. It's called "Are They Dead Yet?" and he joins us to talk about it. Welcome to the program.
SAM ROBERTS: Thank you so much for inviting me.
PERALTA: So, Sam, before this became your job, had you written an obituary before?
ROBERTS: Barely. I had only written a few when I worked for the Daily News and, since 1983, for the Times. And my goal in writing the obituaries, as I point out in the book, is to find the rosebud moment in someone's life. What was it that changed the direction of their lives that, in effect, makes them, if you will, worthy of a New York Times obituary.
PERALTA: And the Rosebud moment refers to a film, right?
ROBERTS: "Citizen Kane," Orson Welles' famous film. Charles Foster Kane is on his deathbed, playing with a snow globe, and he says, Rosebud. And it was the brand name of a sled, and it evoked his innocent childhood.
PERALTA: So you write that when people find out what you do, maybe at a party or something, they often kind of shrink away a death can be such a taboo subject. But you say that you don't write about death. You write about life. How do you approach that part of your assignment?
ROBERTS: Well, I come from a culture, growing up in Brooklyn, where death was denied. When my father died, his sister, my aunt, about six months later, was asked by a neighbor, how is Arthur? How is my father? And the best she could muster was so-so. And I wasn't pleased, frankly, when I got the assignment to help reduce the backlog of what we call advanced obituaries, the nearly departed, if you will. But I realize they are not about death. Death figures into one sentence in the obituary. They are really mini biographies. They are stories of people's lives and what made them celebrated, or even - most of the people I write about I had never heard of.
One of the ones I was most fond of was a young man in his 20s who worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and was involved in the first moon landing, and an alarm went off at the technical center. And all the senior scientists said, oh, we got to abort the mission. This is going to be a disaster. And this young man said, no. I have seen this before. It's a false positive. He persuaded them to continue with the mission, which obviously was a success. You know, nobody knew his name, and yet he had an enormous impact on making sure that the moon landing happened.
PERALTA: A family-written obituary might shy away from information that doesn't reflect well on the deceased. That's not the case with a news obituary. Sometimes the very thing that doesn't reflect well on them is what makes them notorious. But how do you weigh indiscretions, mistakes, crimes against the whole sum of someone's life?
ROBERTS: The two most challenging things I find as a obituarist is, one, deciding who gets an obituary. The Times has written obituaries of Hercule Poirot, of Gus, the neurotic polar bear in the Central Park Zoo. The past week, we even had one of a vacuum cleaner that belonged to Senator Chuck Grassley. But the ones that we choose - 150,000 people, on average, die every day. And we have room for three or four obituaries.
The second challenge - and this relates exactly what you're saying - is how to put in context in the arc of someone's entire life when they did something wrong, when there was a misdeed. And that is a tough decision. When do you call someone in a headline or in the lead paragraph of that obituary a disgraced former politician?
I wrote Charles Rangel's obituary, the Black congressman from Harlem, the first Black chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the House. And he got censured toward the end of his career for a relatively minor, I would say, ethics violation. Now, where do you put that? Do you put that in the lead, in the first paragraph, and say, you know, his career was marred by this censure at the last minute? I decided not to. Given the whole perspective, the arc, the trajectory of his career, that did not belong until an arbitrary judgment, the fourth or fifth paragraph. That should not have defined him. And I think that was the right decision. But those are tough decisions to make.
PERALTA: Let me ask you about the first lines of an obituary, which are, like in any reported story, they're critical. They're the hook that draws the reader or listener in. What's one of your favorites?
ROBERTS: One of my favorites, and this is certainly a little bit offbeat. As an intellectual exercise, I wrote an obituary of Jesus, as he would have been written about in 33 A.D. And I thought this was a lesson in perspective. George Bush - H. W. Bush, when he lost for reelection, was considered a loser. When he died, he was considered an elder statesman.
So what do we think of Jesus, you know, when he died at 33? And I wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean carpenter turned itinerant minister whose appeals to piety and repute as a healer had galvanized a growing contingent of believers, died on Friday after being crucified just outside Jerusalem, only days after his followers had welcomed him triumphantly to the city as the anointed one and the son of David. He was 33. For a man who'd lived the first three decades of his life in virtual obscurity, he attracted a remarkable following in only a few years.
Now, to me, you know, that was kind of fascinating 'cause our perspective on who he was - was he this mystic, was he this crusader, was he this son of God, if you will - changed vividly over hundreds and, certainly, 2,000 years.
PERALTA: You mentioned that sometimes you write an obituary about the one thing that somebody did when they were 25, right? What has writing so many obits over the years taught you about fame or notoriety?
ROBERTS: That is fleeting, for sure. You learn to have a whole other degree of empathy. You learn that fame can be defined in various ways. Who is greater, Hannibal, who marched his troops and elephants over the Alps or some totally anonymous guy who invented the spade? I would vote for the spade man, for one. And I also discovered when the times after 9/11 did the portraits of grief of hundreds of victims of the World Trade Center disaster, and also after COVID, those we've lost. There are no ordinary lives. One obituarist said, who would you miss more, your mayor or your mailman? And there are people we take for granted, who we would miss on a daily basis. Everybody has a story to tell, and it's really up to us to try to find out what that story is. So if I can't find a story in someone's life, in their trajectory, I think that's my failing rather than theirs.
PERALTA: That's New York Times obituary reporter Sam Roberts. His new book is "Are They Dead Yet?" Sam, thank you for talking with us today.
ROBERTS: Thank you so much for inviting me.
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