Since this has been a whirlwind few days, with my new book, Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons from a Small-town Obituary Writer, coming out as a a kind of surprise– I had thought it would be unveiled like magic April 28th, but that was not the case– I figured I’d give you a great thought on obituaries. (The great book news is that I guess readers wanted it so badly that sellers are sending it off the shelves like crazy– Thank you!) Here then, is a line that could have been an epigraph for Find the Good, from Marilyn Johnson’s The Dead Beat:
Obituaries are history as it is happening…whose time am I living in? Was he a success or a failure, lucky or doomed, older than I am or younger? Did she know how to live? I shake out the [obituary] pages. Tell me the secret of a good life!”
