I’m thumbing through my daily paper this day, and I am giving a quick glance at the obituary page pictures to make sure I don’t see someone that I recognize, or, my own.
One picture catches my eye because it is a young face. I don’t recognize the face (good) but my curiosity gets to me and I start reading to see why some one so young has died. Illness?, car accident?. I read that he was 23 years old and I give you the quote of the next paragraph, last name changed.
“Robert Jones, 23, affectionately known as ‘Uncle B’, ‘B’, ‘Yo B’, Rob, Bob, Bobby, Robby, B Rob, and Robert, died on Saturday, August 19”.
Was it wrong to laugh? Jesus, I spilled coffee all over the couch. Humor in an obit. Good for the one who wrote it.
You’re not wrong to laugh. I sure wouldn’t have written or published it, though! I’m okay with humor in an obit, but that makes the writer look like a dork.
I don’t know; humour in an obituary might not be traditionally tasteful, but at least it’s different. When you die, it’s hard to be remembered when your little piece of the paper is exactly like all the others.
Based on the style it’s written, I’m going to guess it was a death notice (sample here) and not a real obit (sample here). People reading the paper wouldn’t bother with the distinction, obviously, but we call them different things.
For people who don’t work in “the biz,” (;)) the difference is that death notices are usually put together by funeral homes, with a little (or in the case of Mildred P. Beers, a lot!) input from the families. They function as an unpaid semi-advertisement for the funeral home, and you can see that the examples I posted all include the address of the funeral home. Obituaries, on the other hand, are written by reporters and usually have bylines. I hate running death notices, I find them depressing.
So what do you call it when it’s essentially a paid ad, handled by the classified department? My in-laws’ notices cost us about $100 apiece. It’s the only way our paper will run anything but name and date.
I’m tempted to call it “getting soaked,” but that isn’t a technical term. I suppose you’d still call that a death notice, and I guess it’s not surprising that you might have to pay to get that into a larger paper. I work for a community paper, so we have a smaller population to draw from.
Well, it is pretty much a community paper. It sure is written like one. But it has delusions of grandeur. They used to run death notices, or obituaries, or whatever, for free, just like I think they still do with weddings and anniversaries, but since they became part of the big city paper family they charge for them. And I agree with “getting soaked”.
I kid, I kid. I know how a lot of community papers are written. I’m sorry they’re giving you trouble about that. These things are hard enough to deal with as it is. What’s that line from The Big Lebowski? “Just because we’re berevead doesn’t make us saps?”
