Why I read the Obituaries
I've been a regular reader of the obituaries in the Times for decades now. It's the only section in which I read most of the pieces, most days. Like a well-written blog, an obit gives you a good story in not too many words. Actually, it's a whole life distilled down to something around a thousand words: biographies in a capsule.
The daily news reports events that are unfolding. How they’re resolved will not be revealed until later, often much later. Obits, on the other hand, are stories with the beginning, middle and end all neatly wrapped up in a few paragraphs.
Stanley Jaffe died recently at age eighty-four. During his career he produced a dozen movies, including three notable ones: Kramer v. Kramer, Goodbye Columbus and Fatal Attraction. For Kramer, he persuaded Dustin Hoffman, who was fed up with Hollywood and intent on returning to the theater, to play the male lead. At the 1980 Oscars it won both the Best Picture and Best Director awards. Hoffman won for Best Actor and Meryl Streep earned her first of three Oscars. It tells the agonizing story of a divorce within the urban professional class. Whether it’s still as poignant today as it was when I saw it, I can’t say. I prefer to keep my glowing memory of it intact.
In the 1970s and then again in the 90s, Jaffe was president of Paramount Pictures. As someone who spent twenty years bottom fishing in Hollywood (producing and distributing cartoons, talk shows and a never-yet-revealed documentary about JFK's assassination), I marvel at Jaffe's ability to have remained a 'player' in Hollywood for fifty years. That's a very long time to have stayed afloat in those shark-infested waters.
The same week the Times ran Stanley Jaffe's obit, it published one about Thomas Moser, a person I feel some connection to, as we have a number of pieces of furniture designed and built by his Maine-based company.
"Thomas Moser, a self-taught woodworker who quit his job as a college professor in 1972 to found a furniture company in Maine and then spent five decades resurrecting traditional American styles with an unmatched attention to detail and craftsmanship, died on March 5 at his home in Harpswell, Maine. He was 90. Thomas Moser Furniture which [he]and his wife, Mary, opened in an abandoned grange hall in New Gloucester, Maine, was a throwback to the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century, though in its styles it reached back another 100 years, to the simple forms of Shaker chairs and tables.
It also pushed against two dominant, intertwining trends in American furniture making: the commodified blandness of midcentury modernism and the replacement of small workshops with corporate production facilities, many of which were overseas and used unsustainable materials and practices…
Every Thos. Moser piece is made by hand; the wood — primarily ash and cherry — comes from within a few hundred miles of his workshop; and each item is finished simply, with oil and wax, never varnish or paint, so the grain of the wood and the precision of the joints are evident.
Mr. Moser’s work is not cheap. A single continuous armchair, an original Moser design with one sinuous piece of wood as both back support and arm rest, can run up to $2,730. But he saw the value in different terms: These were items to serve multiple generations, and, amortized over 75 years or more, such a chair starts to look like a bargain."
For most readers, the subject's death is merely the event that gets their stories published. There may well be unhinged people who read obituaries to learn the cause of death, which they then tabulate in composition notebooks. As children they were trainspotters: spending much of their free time noting the types, numbering and routes of trains entering and leaving the station. The rest of us are voyeurs with short attention spans, happy to read about others who led noteworthy lives.
A middle-school teacher in Massachusetts, Peter Sipe, has designed an obituary-based curriculum. Kids should learn these life stories, Sipes reminds us, because biographies, even very compressed ones, can provide insight and wisdom. He offers three other reasons why eleven-year-olds should study obituaries:
"Informative: Obituaries are some of the most nutrient-dense texts a child can read. They’re biography, history, and often works of literature—-major newspapers put some of their best writers on the obit beat.
Interesting: Whether it’s the New York Times or the Washington Post the obituaries section is exclusive real estate. They don’t let boring people in.
Inspirational: The curriculum features the obituaries of a flight attendant, a math professor, a farm hand, an inventor, a lieutenant colonel, and a lottery winner. They portray bravery, kindness, perseverance, ingenuity, and levelheadedness, all qualities we’d want children to acquire." Amen to that.
Nostalgia is a longing that brings you back to into a varnished tableaux of the past, where memories float in warm water, and as Keats put it, "touch the stubble- plains with rosy hue." My memory of Kramer v. Kramer is wrapped in nostalgia. Still today, I remember leaving the theater deeply moved by what I’d just seen. I also envy Stanley Jaffe's glittering career, and nostalgia allows me to fly backwards to the beginning of my business life and imagine that my path would have somehow followed his.
Moser's furniture is all about evoking earlier times when skilled craftsmen worked wood into beautiful pieces. He called this work, "the lost art of making furniture well,"
My life crossed paths with the works of Jaffe and Moser, not with the men themselves. But in reading their obituaries, nostalgia allows me to create these imaginary connections with them. It’s not a waking dream; more like the pleasure of a warm bath.
As all obituaries are reports of what their subjects have accomplished, they’re welcome reminders, especially in times such as these, that our world is replete with people in possession of a vast array of talents, who have spent their time above ground with purpose, and left the world a better place.