Writing an obituary offers its author a wide-angle view of the deceased and the flexibility to underscore his many good qualities that had remained somewhat obscure during his lifetime. Here Raj Kanwar shares his thoughts on the art of obituary writing.
IS writing of an obituary as easy as doing the profile of a living person? Can writing of obituaries be turned into a niche genre? And what is the difference between the writing of an obituary of a dear friend and that of an unrelated individual? Even when one knows all about his dear departed friend, still it becomes disturbing experience in many ways.
I discovered all this in ample measure in 2012 when I wrote my first obituary on the New Year day, I had not imagined that it might be a forerunner of many more obituaries in the months to come. In my long and chequered career in journalism, interrupted by some professional and business detours, I have had many occasions to write obituaries but then it was just once in a while, and even the obituaries were mostly ‘matter of fact’ without any embellishments. But now after all these years, both my friends and readers expected from me obituaries that would match ‘gourmet’ standards, no less from a master chef.
Most rookie journalists would view writing of obituaries as a distasteful exercise. What is an obituary then? In short, an obituary is nothing but a narrative of a life already lived; the difference between writing a profile of a living person and an obituary of a deceased individual is primarily a matter of ‘Tense’. The living person is referred to in the ‘Present’ and the dead person in the ‘Past’ tense. The facts remain essentially the same.
I soon discovered that writing an obituary offers its author a wide-angle view of the deceased and the flexibility to underscore his many good qualities that had remained somewhat obscure during his lifetime. Also an obituary writer tends to ignore some of his negative traits and unseemly incidents and events from his life, thereby presenting a positive image of him. For me, writing of obituary of my friends became an emotionally-wrenching experience. Many scenes from the lives of those departing friends would flit before my mind’s eyes; I remembered the unfulfilled wishes or dreams of some of them and wished they had lived a little longer to see at least the fruition of those wishes or dreams. I also recalled that a few of those late friends had nurtured grudges against some of their friends or even against their spouses, but I suppressed all such thoughts since bringing into open those private grudges or unrealized wishes is not part of an ideal obituary.
