I read obituaries. I read obituaries every day. I have read obituaries every day since I was 11 years old. I wake up in the morning, and before I start my day I go to the front door, open it, and retrieve the New York Times that has been delivered to my home. I retreat to the bathroom and I open the paper to read the obituaries. Before I dress. Before my coffee. Before breakfast. I read obituaries. I check the ages of those who have died. 98, 102, and 89, perhaps there is hope. 62, 49, and 34, looks like it will be a bad day. I read the causes and circumstances of death. Died in his sleep of natural causes — a sigh of relief. I notice so many more musicians and artists and drummers for obscure rock groups of the 60s seem to die and get featured obituaries than doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and palliative care clinicians. Perhaps it’s a biased sample — those people who get that special obituary for noteworthy deaths with that special picture when they were younger in their prime. Why do I read obituaries so compulsively? Well, the answer is of course multi-layered. On the most accessible level, I am fascinated by the stories of peoples lives. The narratives of lives lived in all their variety, length, scope, and focus. They are dramas that have the potential to aid us all in the search for who we want to become and examples to measure ourselves against. As the Talmud taught us, “What is truer than the truth? The story.” However, on a perhaps deeper level, reading obituaries, for me, is an inquiry in how to create an attitude and a perspective to death. It is a re-confirmation, each day, that death is real, an inevitable part of life, and that, in fact, we live with death every moment. In creating the story of our life, we create a story of a life lived and a death that is ever present and can occur at any moment. It is a reminder that death is at the essence of life, reconfirms life, and that death punctuates life. Reading obituaries allows me to maintain a sense of mortality salience as I live each moment of life. Death is always present in our lives. It is a constant. But now, in the Age of the COVID-19 pandemic, death is even more constantly present. In fact, there are more deaths each day, and more deaths this past year, that at any time in our recent history. It is January 22, 2021, 1 year since the start of this global pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic “Numbers” are unfathomable: 100 million COVID-19 cases worldwide and 2.1 million deaths globally. In the United States alone, we have almost 24 million COVID-19 cases and more than 420,000 deaths. This excess mortality due to COVID-19 has resulted in more obituaries being printed in our newspapers than at any time in the recent past. And so I am reading more obituaries; more COVID-19 obituaries.
