The Last Word

The practice

Every newspaper worth the name writes obituaries in advance.

This shocks people who have not thought about it and stops shocking them the moment they do: a significant figure dies at eleven at night, and there are three thousand words on the site by midnight, and those three thousand words were not written in an hour.

Thea Ashworth-Boyd has written obituaries in advance for nineteen years.

The stock stands at four hundred and eleven.

The stock

Politicians, mostly. Then actors, then scientists, then a long tail of people who are famous in one field and unknown outside it, who are the most interesting to write and the least read.

Each is updated annually or on news. Each has a note at the top with the date of last revision and the initials of the reviser.

The oldest live file in the drawer was begun in 1994 and its subject is ninety-eight and in robust health and has now outlived two of the three journalists who have worked on it.

On the strangeness

People assume it is morbid.

Thea's experience is the opposite. It is the least morbid work in journalism, because you are writing about a life while the person is alive, and you are not on deadline, and you can therefore do the thing that the news pages never permit, which is to be accurate about someone.

She has interviewed forty of her subjects. They know why she is there. It is understood in the trade that if the obituaries desk rings, it is not an insult, and about a third of people take the call.

Those conversations are, she says, the best of her career.

The rules

You do not speculate about cause.

You do not write the first line before the person dies. The first line depends on how they die and on what the world is like on the day, and a stock first line is the single most reliable way to look like a fool.

You do not tell the subject's family.

And — this is the one that took her four years to learn — you do not fall in love with your own file.

File 209

Started 2007. Subject: a mathematician, now eighty-four, whose work in the 1970s underlies a technology that everybody uses and nobody attributes to her.

Thea has revised it eleven times.

It is the best thing she has ever written. She is aware that this is not a defensible thing to say about an obituary of a living person and she has said it to precisely one colleague.

The problem is that it is four thousand words.

Four thousand words is a front-of-book obituary reserved for former prime ministers. Her subject is a mathematician who has never given an interview and whose death will command, realistically, six hundred words and probably four hundred.

Thea knows this. She has known it since about 2012.

She has gone on revising it.

What her editor said

In 2021 her editor read it, because Thea asked him to, which she had never done before.

He read all four thousand words. Then he said: "This is wonderful. We're never running this."

"I know."

"You know that and you've written it anyway."

"Yes."

He handed it back and said: "Then don't cut it. Cut a version. Keep this one."

There are now two files. 209 and 209-short. The short one is six hundred words and is professional and correct and Thea does not think about it.

What happened in March

She got a letter.

Handwritten, forwarded through the paper, from the mathematician.

It said that a mutual acquaintance had mentioned, some years ago, that the paper maintained a file on her. It said she had thought about it on and off since and had decided, at eighty-four, that she would like to ask a question.

The question was: Is it accurate?

Not is it kind. Not may I see it.

What Thea did

She rang her editor, who said absolutely not, and then said give me an hour, and then rang back and said that as a matter of policy the answer was no and that as a matter of anything else he was going to be out of the office on Thursday.

Thea went on Thursday.

She did not take the file. She took nothing. She sat in a kitchen in Cambridge for four hours and asked a woman of eighty-four about a paper published in 1974, and about her supervisor, and about the eleven years when nobody cited her, and about the year they started.

She went back to the office and revised file 209 for the twelfth time.

It is now four thousand four hundred words.

The last line

Obituaries end on the family and the survivors. That is the convention and Thea has kept it four hundred and eleven times.

File 209 ends differently. It ends on a sentence the mathematician said in her kitchen, about the eleven years, which Thea wrote down in the car afterwards because she had not been taking notes and had not wanted to.

The sentence will never be published, because the file will never run at four thousand four hundred words, because it will run at six hundred, because that is what the space is.

Thea knows this.

She revises it every spring.