My phone rang just after I got into the office and before I had a chance to fill my coffee cup. It was a lawyer I knew on the other end.
“Tim, this is Rick. Do you have a minute to talk?”
In the background I could hear the voice of a woman shouting a string of obscenities that would make a bar full of Marines wince. Worse, I thought I heard my own name sprinkled into her tirade.
“Yes,” I said.
At that point, Rick went on to tell me that the obituary I wrote the night before - the one that was now in the morning newspaper - had a typo in it. The prominent lawyer who worked at my client’s law firm, Rick’s law firm, had died at home, but not in the tony neighborhood where I was told he lived. Instead, he lived in a nearby, more middleclass neighborhood.
Forty-eight hours after this lawyer died, I’m learning that he took pride in his middleclass roots, all while his widow is cussing me out for the crime of preparing and sending his obituary into the major newspapers the night before.
At this point, I promise to see what I can do to get a correction. Just after I end the call my phone rings again. It’s my other contact at the same law firm who gave me the errant information for the obituary. We compare notes, and it becomes obvious to me that the prominent attorney’s widow has enough clout to get him fired if she discovers he made the mistake. That’s when I agree to take the heat for him.
And so, the “Widow Smith” is left to assume I made this egregious mistake, no one at my client’s firm will be fired, and I do get the newspaper to make the correction for future editions and online.
All is well? Not quite.
It turns out that Mrs. Smith and her now deceased husband had been very close friends with the CEO of the global communications firm where I worked. She was very tight with my boss’s boss’s boss. And now she was determined to get me fired.
That sparked some hastily convened internal meetings at my firm, where it is once again determined that while I was not responsible for the inaccurate information I was given, it would be best for all concerned that the widow continue to believe I was at fault. A promise is made to me that I will not be fired. The CEO himself assured me of this. And so it happened that way.
What I learned in the process of this, and a handful of other times when I’ve written someone’s obituary is why people are like this when someone close to them dies.
Your obituary is the final record, the final “report card” if you will, on the legacy you leave. When someone dies, their loved ones feel a sense of loss of control, a helplessness. They desperately want to grab hold and control anything, everything that they can to make things right. And so, they see the process for finalizing that obituary as a way to do that.
They want the world to see this perfect encapsulation of their loved one’s life and legacy. One misplaced comma could be enough to set them off.
After that, I’ve written several other obituaries and each time I saw the same dynamics at play. The obituary becomes the focus of their acute obsession to put a fine point on their loved one’s life. To make it perfect.
Looking back, I gained a better understanding of what was going through the mind of someone I had never met before, this doyenne of society, who found a way to include my name a cloud of blue obscenity that held over the city of Pittsburgh one summer morning, on an otherwise cloudless day.