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Hi, Heather.
How are you?
I'm fabulous.
I am here in a very small town on an island in Alaska and it's raining and might snow and my cabin is on piling so you may hear waves.
The tide is high right now, and it comes under the house.
Well, doesn't that sound good?
It is good.
It's very idyllic.
Heather Lundy lives in Haines, Alaska.
Haines has about 2,000 people.
It is connected to the Alaska Marine Highway system.
So you take a ferry in.
It's about 90 miles north of Juneau, maybe 15 miles south of Skagway on a fjord.
And it's the longest fjord in North America.
And Haines is up at the top of it.
And it looks like Switzerland with a beach.
And how long have you been writing obituaries in Hanes?
My first obituary I wrote in 1996.
So, almost 30, what is that, almost 30 years?
Jeez Louise.
How many do you think you've written over the 30 years?
Well, my The former editor at the Chilcot Valley News.
I asked him.
I said Tom, how many do you think I've written?
And he said, well, he said probably 500.
But why don't you just say 400?
Because you always exaggerate.
So all backwards.
But I think about 500, actually.
And I haven't saved them all.
They're really very local.
They're for a local paper and the local people in Haines to read.
Heather never set out to write obituaries.
I was writing a little column for the paper called Duly Noted at the time, which is the bold face.
You know, the Katzik family went to Disneyland last week and they all enjoyed a visit there.
Or Liz and Tom had a party for their oldest daughter when she graduated from college last week.
Another writer usually did the paper's obituaries.
But then a woman named Nedra Waterman died.
Nedra and the usual writer had had a falling out.
Before she died, she told a friend she didn't want him writing about her.
And so the editor of the paper at the time said well Heather, since you write about live people, you could probably write about dead people.
Luckily for me, Nedra had pretty much written down exactly what she wanted in it and had a lot of really great details.
And so she might not have realized it, but she taught me how to write an obituary.
And I knew her family well, so that helped.
And she was old, so that helped a lot.
And her death was not unexpected, which also helped a lot.
Because a big part, of course, the biggest part of writing obituaries is grief.
And that takes time a lot more getting used to or adjusting to, or just time to figure out how to navigate that.
Did you know after writing that first obituary that you'd keep writing them?
I don't know.
I think maybe because I liked it.
It might sound odd but I was relatively young and I was new to Alaska and I had a couple of little children and my husband was running a lumberyard and was busy all the time.
And in this place that I was in, I kept running across these people that I just thought were so exceptional and weren't like anyone I had ever met growing up on Long Island, outside of New York City.
And I... discovered very quickly that when people die, they tell you all the stories.
The family does, the friends do, much more so than when someone's alive.
Heather has known just about everyone she's written an obituary for, but she says she's surprised all the time.
For instance, a teacher that was out at the Klukwan School, a mild-mannered teacher that taught at a native school for years and years.
He'd been a Golden Glove boxing champion, a featherweight champion in Chicago.
And I can't just rely on the family to tell me that.
You have to ask for proof, which is sometimes a little awkward.
But they brought out his little Golden Glove and a book with his name in it and a poster.
He was on a bill with like Rocky Graziano or something.
And people read the obituary and like, I had no idea because he never said anything.
People tend not to, I don't know, brag or boast or share some things about their lives.
But after they die, you find out a lot.
Before Heather writes anything down about a person, she listens to stories about them.
I typically ask a family, once we've kind of gotten through the details and everybody's not as emotional, to just start throwing out words that remind them.
You know that describe the deceased.
People usually say things like generous, kind, or smart.
One woman told Heather that her mother was a good listener.
And so then I asked, well, in what way?
And she told me that she'd come home every day after school and her mother would be ironing in the kitchen.
And you know the old fashioned iron with the starched wet stuff in the basket and the little spritzer thing and the steam.
And it would be this big thing.
And her mother ironed pillowcases, underwear, everything.
She said she always was ironing. for a good two hours every day.
And she would just tell her mother about her day and sit and talk and her mom would be busy, ironing and quiet, thus a good listener.
But then she said, I came home from college and my mom wasn't ironing anymore.
And I said, what happened?
How come you stopped ironing?
And she said, I only did it.
So he would talk to me after school.
What do you do when someone's life hasn't?
There are good parts of everyone's life, but what about if there's bad, really bad parts?
You know, if the person was just, it was a jerk, you know, how do you, how do you handle that?
You make it short.
No, I'm not kidding.
I mean, then you fall right back on like the death notice, the what the original purpose of an obituary is.
You don't turn them into a great person.
You might say he was a good dog trainer.
You might have a quote that someone says, boy, he really had great hunting dogs.
Sometimes the bad parts do show up in Heather's obituaries.
She remembers one she wrote for an old miner.
He had been not a particularly good husband or father.
There had been a lot of years where there was, I think, drinking and a level of abuse.
I don't know if it was physical, but certainly emotional.
He was tough.
He was a hard man.
And the women in his family are just lovely people.
And I know them well.
And I was wondering, like, when he died, how is this going to go?
And I'd seen him as an older man, and he always struck me as pretty kindly, but I'd heard stories.
And after he died, I was able to ask those questions that you wouldn't in polite company.
So, was he a good dad or husband?
And they said, well, for a lot of years, no.
Then they told Heather a story.
They said that once he was driving over a mountain pass and a blizzard started.
Then he heard a voice.
It told him he better shape up.
And he quit drinking and he became soft and kind.
And his grandchildren remembered him with nothing but kindness, while his relationship with their parents was a lot more complicated.
The man's wife and his daughters told Heather that she shouldn't leave anything out.
This past summer, a woman named Barbara Darlene Blackwell died.
Barbara had lived in Haines for decades.
She moved to Alaska in the 60s with her five children.
Her family asked Heather to write her eulogy.
Heather wrote, quote, They ate a lot of oatmeal.
Barb served it up in small bowls. so the kids could always have seconds.
When her husband was away too long, she'd walk to town and hawk his shotgun to buy groceries and cigarettes.
Often, she would say she wasn't hungry and skip meals so her children could have more.
Heather wrote that one day Barb read an article about how to quit smoking and decided to follow its instructions.
Quote, she dreamed of cigarettes. finding them in her car or a drawer for the rest of her life.
When Barb was 94, she had a fall.
There is talk of flying to another city for treatment, but Barb didn't want that.
Heather wrote.
Her family arrived from near and far children and in-laws, grandchildren sitting bedside for two weeks.
Everyone said goodbye, a lot.
She'd close her eyes and they'd think, maybe?
And she'd say, I can still hear you.
Heather wrote, quote, maybe she's listening still.
We'll be right back.
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In Provincetown Massachusetts there's a local weekly paper that aims to publish a full reported obituary for every single person who dies in the four towns it covers.
We think everybody should have an obituary, no matter who they are.
Ed Miller is the co-founder and editor of the Provincetown Independent.
We try and write about living people, too, obviously.
But I always have felt that the obituaries are among the most important news stories that we publish, because it gives us a chance to say what's most important.
Not a lot of small town newspapers write obituaries.
They print them, but they're submitted by families who write their obituaries themselves and pay to have them published.
There are a few different writers who work on obituaries at the Independent.
When Ed hears that someone has died, he spends some time thinking about who should tell their story.
And, you know, I have a long list of things that we expect any obituary to include.
But the most important thing really is what kind of life did this person lead?
What made this person noteworthy in any way, either by their accomplishments, their character, their hobbies, their quirks, their joys and sorrows, and tragedies.
Early last year, Pauline Fisher died.
Pauline owned a shop in Provincetown called Map, where she sold clothes jewelry, books and anything else that caught her eye.
She handpicked everything and was famous for her taste.
Ed heard that Pauline had been close with the author Michael Cunningham, who wrote The Hours and won a Pulitzer Prize.
He asked Michael if he might be interested in writing Pauline's obituary.
It was funny because what he submitted was beautifully written but it kind of left out all of the basics that need to go in obituaries.
I guess he'd never written an obituary before.
And so I kind of had to send it back to him and say okay, we need to know a little bit more here about how did she get to Provincetown.
What did she do before that?
And how did she manage to create this store?
And he was happy to revise.
I felt a little embarrassed about asking him to rewrite something.
The guy won a Pulitzer Prize, geez.
But he really wanted it to be right.
Michael wrote, quote, Pauline was wry and funny and generous.
She had a presence.
That is, she emanated more personal force than most of us do.
Michael enjoyed being in Pauline's store so much that one day he wrote she suggested he could work there.
And so he did, for a couple of days each summer.
Pauline made the same offer to another one of her regular customers, the filmmaker John Waters.
He told Michael that Pauline refused his suggestion to yell thanks for not buying anything to people as they walked out of the store.
Michael wrote, quote, she may have been the most widely loved person I've ever known.
Ed says that sometimes he gets complaints.
What sometimes happens is that people will send us an obituary and they will say you know, please print this exactly as I've written it.
And I explain that we don't do that.
We... rewrite things to conform to our standards.
So, you know, for example, we say that the person died.
We don't say that they passed away or that they, you know, crossed over to the other side, or any of those things.
We say they died.
Obituaries also tend to expose conflict within families.
So what will happen is there'll be a disagreement between children or siblings of the deceased about what should go or should not go in the obituary.
And that's such an interesting thing about obituaries how often the people who are drafting them for their loved ones are inclined to whitewash things.
So it's a real balancing act to achieve the truth without doing too much violence to the wishes of the survivors.
One of the things that people often say to us is He or she didn't want that to be in their obituary.
Or sometimes they didn't want any obituary at all.
And I don't usually say this in so many words, but my feeling about it is that obituaries are not for the person who died.
They're for all the rest of us.
Well, let's just start with you introducing yourself.
Yeah.
Hi, I'm Grace.
I'm currently a junior at Harvard studying economics and English.
Let's see.
I interned at the Providence Independent last summer as a fellow.
And yeah.
Grace Yoon learned about the independence obituary section in her very first meeting with Ed.
And she knew right away that she wanted to write one.
In my college paper.
I do a lot of policy reporting so I reported on like Trump and higher education.
But when I went to the Independent, I really wanted to write about people.
About three weeks into her fellowship, Grace's Ed sent her an email.
A woman named Rudell Falkenberg had died.
The email had some facts about her life like that she was 79 and had run a nursery school out of her own home.
There was also an address for a house on Storybook Lane.
So I went to the house and the first thing that I noticed is her door is painted completely red and it's speckled with like yellow and white paint.
Grace met with Rudell's son, Sister-in-law, and her husband. and like paper vines and leaves.
And I was like, where am I?
It kind of felt like stepping into an entirely new world.
Rudell's sister-in-law gave Grace a tour of the house.
The first thing that she pointed out to me were these gigantic dollhouses that lined almost every wall of the house.
And these dollhouses like vintage kind of figurines there were portraits on the walls there were rugs and her son Titus would point out like a portrait that was hung on one of the walls of the dollhouse and he'd be like oh and that's one of her grandchildren so these dollhouses were so meticulously made and I was told that her husband Warren would actually build these dollhouses for Riddell and then Riddell would paint and then fill them Was there any sense of you being, you know, only alive for 20 years and writing about someone who had been alive for 80 years and saying, like, well, what do I know?
Yeah, I think there was definitely a sense of that.
And I remember, when I came out of that house after spending two hours with the family, I called my roommate and I said, like May, I think this may be the most important story that I may have ever written and may ever write.
Grace says she worked on the opening line for two hours.
She thought a lot about Warren.
I wanted him to read it and think yes, this is my wife and yes, like this is the fullest extent to which words can convey her.
The line Grace eventually settled on was quote everyone in Rudell Falkenberg's life knew she was magical.
We'll be right back.
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There was one obituary from the Provincetown Independent that I knew I wanted to talk to Ed Miller about.
It was for Tracy Tarvers, who died at 59 in August 2021.
Tracy was a woman who was well-known in Provincetown.
She had grown up here.
She was a cosmetologist and after finishing school she opened her own store in Wellfleet where she sold handmade soaps and other beauty products.
And when she was 35 years old, I believe, she was involved in a horrible car accident that left her pretty severely disabled.
So she had to use a wheelchair, and she had suffered a traumatic brain injury.
But she was a remarkable person in that she... had this really indefatigable spirit.
Tracy was so good at talking to people that the police asked if she would be open to speaking with repeat DUI offenders about road safety.
Her obituary read, quote, Hard as that must have been, she embraced the challenge.
Tracy liked to visit Provincetown's Commercial Street.
She'd go up and down it to say hello to everyone, and visit her favorite places to eat.
In another town, one shop named a sandwich after her.
We received a message from her family about her death that was a little bit cryptic.
It didn't say exactly what had happened.
I assigned one of our writers, Tom Recchio, who is a retired English professor and who became really one of our best obituary writers.
Tom met with Tracy's family.
Her brother told him quote she was pretty fearless, always looking for something else, something more.
Towards the end of Tracy's obituary.
After stories about her work and the days she spent meeting people in town, Tom wrote quote On August 12th, Tracy rode her wheelchair to New Bedford Harbor and, pushing herself free from her constraints, she went into the water.
That was how her family had put it.
They were perfectly willing to have.
That fact, the fact that she had chosen to end her own life in that way, um it, you know, it was part of who she was, and uh tom, i think, was able to put that story into words.
You know, when i read obituaries in smaller town newspapers, I find myself saying well, that was a full life.
And it has nothing to do with what the person accomplished necessarily.
And I think that is the greatest thing one can say after reading someone's obituary what a full life.
It doesn't The other part of it is that a full life doesn't coincide with a long life.
And that, I think, is one of the hardest lessons I've learned writing obituaries.
A lot of people die way too young.
And some of the people whose lives I'm sort of trying to fill with things may have lived for a long time.
People have long, slow lives, and sometimes people have very short, jam-packed lives.
And I don't know what that means in the grand scheme of things, but it's something, I think.
I think it's important.
Well, you know, it makes you not want to have someone write, she really loved TV.
Heather Lundy says she doesn't write as many obituaries. as she used to.
Now, with social media, sometimes people don't want one.
It's just been on Facebook or on Instagram, and I think something's lost when that happens.
And I don't want to be just one of those people that are always sad about changes, but I think obituaries are really important.
Not so much for what's in them, but the and the statement and the community connection and the relationships.
Do you hear from readers of The Independent about the obituary section?
Oh yeah, all the time.
A very common remark that I get is, I wish I had known that person.
That person just really seemed like such a great person.
I wish I had known her.
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I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is love.
