Andrew Losowsky

Last writes

February 2004, Decease

The most important thing, according to andrew losowsky, is to be remembered.

If there's one thing I hate about death, it's that it's badly written.

Let's start with the eulogy. Everyone gets one and they're as memorable as last month's lottery draw. It's a well-practised routine: the vicar/rabbi/witch doctor stands to say a few nice words about the stiff while secretly muttering to themselves about how they'd never bothered when alive to turn up to church/synagogue/bonfire chanting. The family smiles, shakes hands, says how beautiful the ceremony was, has a slice of cake and some tea, and then is never seen again (until it's their turn).

And don't get me started about the epitaph. People agonise for days over the perfect pithy phrase to sum up a life on a headstone or urn jar, before settling on the same corny lines as everyone else, as thought up by half-rate Hollywood screenwriters or Celine Dion. You may as well write "I'm with stupid =>" on a tombstone and have done with it. Within five years, no-one will remember which one's yours, and within another five, the letters will have washed off in the rain and become just so many cracks in the paving. And so it goes on.

But there is one exception to these empty words and amateur scribbles. A private club where only the good, the great or the really, really bad are admitted. Only the exalted are worthy, receiving a golden ticket that guarantees admission to literature and immortality. I speak, of course, of the obituary.

It's the secret of eternal life - your life story, written up by pros and placed in national newspaper archives to be googled and retrieved for all time.

You don't live forever by being filled with formaldehyde and frozen next to the pork chops. Atheists like me aren't in line when the deities pick teams for the everlasting football game. There are two ways to immortality: by, as Woody Allen once said, not dying, or by getting your name on that elusive page that proclaims: "here was someone who truly lived. Here was a man/woman/famous animal movie star who was in some way better (or much, much worse) than you, Mr and Mrs Average, sitting there reading this newspaper while chewing muesli with your mouth open. These people weren't just living their lives, one day at a time. They were ALIVE." The New York Times' former obituaries editor Alden Williams (deceased) knew the score. "Death, the cliche assures us, is the great leveller," he once said. "But it obviously levels some a great deal more than others."

It's a proud cry. It's a noble achievement. And now it is my quest. I'm going to get on that page if it kills me.

I realise that I could achieve this just by doing something noteworthy, like writing a major symphony, curing cancer, marrying a royal or starring in a soap opera. But attempting any of those is a gamble - after all, I have no talent whatsoever and to join a royal family you usually have to be in it already. In any case, it's a means to an end. Let's cut out the middle man. I'm just dying to be obituarised and I'll do whatever it takes to succeed.

After all, how hard can it be? If it costs, I could start saving now, or take out life insurance. I have the internet, a phone and a lot of time on my hands. Hemingway, I tell myself, would've been proud at my initiative and my self-obsession. The only way is up, via six feet underground.

"Obituaries," says Ian Brunskill, obit editor of The London Times, "are usually reserved for holders of the Victoria and George Crosses, heads of state, stars of the entertainment world. Then there are the distinguished professional careers, usually, but not always, British, which we will try to cover in some way if we can: clergy, diplomats, civil servants, scientists, academics, seniors officers in the armed services."

This is not very encouraging. Thus far, the chances of him choosing me from the ranks of the great unwashed seem fairly slim.

So to Plan B: befriend someone in the office, an intern or a secretary, and get them to slide a carefully crafted, completely false obituary into the newspaper when the time comes. Maybe, if I time my death for a slow news day when the editor's on holiday and the deputy off sick, nobody will notice until it's too late.

It certainly avoids the problem of not being worthy and, once the error has been noticed, I don't mind being blamed for it - I'll be dead and my name will already immortalised in the archives. And, in any case, whatever the obit says will become the truth in a generation or so.

So, stage two: get my obituary to say how great I was, get it written to a sufficiently high standard and then hope that no-one at the newspaper will notice that I'm not really famous. I need to find me a pro. A full-time obituary writer with years of experience behind them. Someone who gives good dead.

"Yes, well, we do occasionally get asked by people to write for them," replies C. Claiborne Ray to my enquiry. She's the obituary desk editor of the New York Times and speaks in a clipped, efficient tone. "And we would never do obituaries for hire. It would be against our policy. If you want to pay, you can be mentioned in the paid death notices, though the cost is rather high. But some people's still stretch to columns and columns."

No thanks, Claiborne - newspapers don't archive the classifieds, I checked. And her reply is echoed by a number of other newspaper obituary desks. Small local papers, I'm told, and especially in the US, run parochial obituaries written by staffers, but these are written for the families as much as the readers. That's not what I want to hear - local papers may be all very nice and thoughtful but I'm aiming higher. Ah well, if you want something done properly...

Andrew Losowsky - explorer, writer, scholar and renowned love-maker - has died at the ripe old age of [INSERT HERE] surrounded by his family, friends and a pack of self-tamed meerkats on the Caribbean island of Tsikniti. "When shall we see his like again," wailed the villagers who had come to know him just as 'Papa'. When indeed?

I'll smooth out the details later but I can't help thinking that it's not quite there yet. Perhaps I need a little more advice. And the telephone again. I mean, what's so special about obituary writing?

"It's just journalism," says the obits editor of UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph, Andrew McKie. My research tells me that the Telegraph's obituaries are among the most highly regarded in the world and that McKie is rapidly becoming a legend in his own death notes. "The kind of writer perfect for an obituary is a good writer. We have more facts per square inch in our section than in any other part of the paper. We have a team of three here on the desk at any one time and we work very hard at it. We also try to get people to write the obituaries who have interviewed those featured beforehand, for some other purpose. Our most important thing is factual accuracy and so far our fan mail outweighs our complaints pile by 10 to 1.

"We publish around 1000 obituaries every year, writing maybe three or four times that number. And then we look at the claims of ten times more. But you never know who you'll be writing about next. God is our commissioning editor."

But what about... (how can I put this without arousing suspicion?) ...what about the living? Could one, theoretically, if one had some obscure reason to do so, write obituaries for them?

"Actually only 60% of our time is spent researching and writing about the dead," he answers. "The rest is spent chasing the not-dead."

This is good. It turns out that the Daily Telegraph has files on up to 8000 people who are very much alive. Some are fully prepared obituaries, others just clippings or printouts about people they've spotted, ready for when the time comes. The New York Times has 2000 prebaked obituaries ready to reheat, and The London Times, 4500. Every year since 1937, a journalist at The London Times was paid to update the Queen Mother's stock obituary, until she died 65 years later - making it one of the most expensive collaborations of all time when it finally was allowed to run. And when Bob Hope's finally appeared, a lot of the journalists credited with his obituary around the world had already died themselves.

Losowsky met with a noble end, attempting to break his own world record for geriatric waterskiing by helicopter, while juggling flaming clubs. It was what he would have wanted.

Obituaries, it says here on this webpage (that informs and educates while playing the death march in slow electronic groans), are one of the oldest forms of journalism. Someone dies, it's news, so you write a bit about them. Countries where more people die make less of a thing about them - obituarising at length is, it seems, a western trait, where death is infrequent enough that readers can bear to read about it every day. Obit is the Latin word for death. The Spanish word for obituary is necrología.

How much, as a writer, do you include about the details of the death itself? Do you go into detail about how the head was severed from the body, splattering blood all over the kitchen, in an unfortunate accident with a chicken drumstick? Or do you just say "died at work"? In times of war or disaster, the detail seems to drop. In peacetime, the gore count rises again. It's the same system used by Hollywood and it has traditional roots.

According to the book Obituaries in American Culture by Janice Hume, the same rules applied to the newspapers of 1870, when deaths in those years following the civil war were listed merely as "died suddenly" or "after a short/protracted/lingering illness". Pre-war newspapers, when people weren't so weary of lists of the deceased, revelled in gruesome details such as "strangulated hernia, bursting of a blood vessel, shot in a riot, caught in a printing press, buzz saw accident, cholera from eating green corn, burned in a laboratory fire, killed by Indians." I don't know who the guy was, but I hope he didn't suffer.

For the better part of twenty years, Losowsky had been unknown in the world, but his discovery of the lost city of Ug, and then learning its forgotten language over a single weekend, changed all of that. But fame had little effect, as he remained as he had been before: ambitious, convivial in the company of friends and very clear about the finer things in life.

Reading obituaries is like reading school reports: after a while, you learn to read between the lines. Just as "could try harder" is teacher-speak for "is a complete waste of space", at the hands of a subtle writer, a life can be damned with faint praise through careful use of understatement.

Hugh Massingberd, one of Andrew McKie's predecessor's at The Daily Telegraph, seems to have been the master at this. When he wrote "convivial", people knew he was talking about a drunkard. Anyone who "might be judged not always to have upheld the highest ethical standards" was a dirty crook. If they "didn't suffer fools gladly" then the deceased was unpopular, "a raconteur" was a deathly bore, and "relished physical contact" meant a sadist.

"After denying his homosexuality in the High Court in London," Massingberd wrote in one famous obituary, "Liberace won damages and an apology... He was unmarried."

When it launched in 1986, one of the areas that The Independent newspaper in the UK concentrated on was a high standard of obituary writing. And it's there that I find exactly what I've been looking for: in 2002, they printed the obituary of a biographer and occasional obituarist called Michael De-La-Noy. And the piece was credited to the man himself. He had completed it on the day he suffered his final stroke.

The newspaper labelled it an auto-obituary, declaring it sufficiently well-written to include, printing alongside it a further obituary filling in the gaps that De-La-Noy had subtly left. Who cares about the New York Times and their "policy"? As my man DLN and I know well, self-obituarising is the way forward.

My mood is further brightened by the discovery of other auto-obits. The sci-fi writer Robert Forward did it too ("The intelligent pattern of protoplasm that had been Robert L Forward ceased coherent operation on September 21, 2002").

More disturbingly, however, I'm sharing the company of hideous British romance novelist Barbara Cartland, who lived beyond a century and, shortly before her time was up, sent a 46-page pamphlet around to all of the obituary desks, wrapped in pink ribbon and entitled "How I Want To Be Remembered".

As one auto-obituarist to another, Barbara, the ribbon was a bit much.

They say you can judge a lot about a man by his bookshelf, and Losowsky was no exception. His carefully thumbed copies of SAS Survival manuals and Calvin and Hobbes collections show that, deep in the heart of this rugged adventurer, he wasn't afraid to laugh at a cartoon tiger. A lesson for us all, there.

"Everyone has something to uncover," says Andrew McKie of The Daily Telegraph. "I ring people who knew them, call around - the information is always out there. I look for something quirky and interesting, not just another Who's Who. I want to know if they never ate soup or if they wore pink socks every day. And why."

I don't trust any of my friends to say the right thing about me, but I certainly don't want my obituary to be too dull or serious. One of the greatest obituary writers of all time, Robert McG Thomas at the New York Times, would be on my side. He took on the writing about small names and virtual unknowns with a vigour that no-one else on the desk could fathom. And he did it with style.

"J. Edward Day, the wisecracking Cabinet officer who gave the nation the five-digit ZIP code died on Tuesday. He was 82 and lived in Chevy Chase, Md 20815."

"Hal Lipset, the sleuth who helped elevate, or rather reduce, electronic surveillance to a miniature art, died on Monday."

"Can a career woman, who sacrificed her leisure to keep a nation of enthralled housewives glued to their radios, survive the regimen of producing up to 90 episodes a week to live a rich and long life? No need to stay tuned or wait for a toothpaste commercial. It can now be revealed that, when she died in bed on July 5, the woman widely credited with inventing the soap opera was a 91-year-old multimillionaire."

The man could write like a beast and was the undisputed master at it until 2000, when the unenviable task came to one of his colleagues to write the obit of the man himself. That piece is included, along with the best of the man's work, in the book 52 McGs.

"He is very much missed," admits C. Claiborne Ray at the NYT. "He made an art of the eccentric obituary."

After all, the most eccentric ones are also the most irresistible. Try this opening from Hugh Massingberd at The Daily Telegraph:

"Denisa, Lady Newborough, who has died aged 79, was many things: wire-walker, nightclub girl, nude dancer, airpilot. She only refused to be two things - a whore and a spy - 'and there were attempts to make me both,' she once wrote."

The piece goes on to say that she spoke 14 languages, designed a hat covered in half-smoking cigarettes, and her many admirers included Kings of Spain and Hitler. "By conventional standards, her morality matched her flaming red hair but she remained as proud of one as the other," the piece ends. And suddenly I'm sorry that this person I'd never heard of before isn't around any more.

Maybe I've been too circumspect in my obit so far. I should take things a little further. I could try the route of Popped Clogs, a UK-based email newsletter, which includes a text message tribute to each of their obituaries. They call it their "textimonial".

BOB HOPE

gudbI bb hOp
u wr brn in eltm
wrkd wth bng crsby
& drthy lmor
& dId in clifrnia
hw mny pEpl cn bOst th@?
nun nw

American fanzine/website Goodbye! prints tales along similar lines. Run by Steve Miller, who is now obits editor of the New York Sun, it declares that "vital statistics are for census reports and tax returns" while also deciding that taboos were for pussies. Just because they're dead, that doesn't mean they deserve a break.

The late founder of Wendy's Restaurants, for example, is noted in Goodbye! as making claims about his business that "were harder to swallow than his mediocre fries". But this was topped by an entirely fictional obituary of Gene Kelly. Bored of the extensive coverage that the real obituaries were getting, the magazine exclusively revealed instead that "Kelly was killed performing what he described as 'one last mission', a perilous airborne assault on a heretofore secret Finnish centre for offensive intercontinental nuclear dental research."

The editor of Goodbye! started as a cub reporter on a local paper in charge of obituaries, and got so bored with it that he started putting in articles about friends of his that a) weren't true (he made one a patriotic scout master) and b) they weren't actually dead.

Suddenly my obituary writing seems a little tame. Maybe I need to test it out on an audience. And, I discover, there's another website that has just the thing.

"As revealing as a videotaped colonoscopy!" it promises. "We insert your own, personally-written obituary into the middle-right side of a mock newspaper page with a dozen or so others. It could be inserted into a regular newspaper or just mailed to those in-laws in Ohio who you'd rather stop sending you Christmas cards."

"Customers who order this also often order C-68!", which turns out to be 'fake your own death in a car crash'.

Some maintain that Losowsky's finest hour came at the 'McSweeneys vs Pulitzers' wrestling bout, where he not only pinned "Dastardly" Dave Eggers with a grapplehold, but at the same time managed to force both Woodward and Bernstein into a corner. An honorary induction of the Sports Hall of Fame was later modestly refused.

I'm running out of steam fast. What else is there to include? Fortunately, the Mount Olympus for all things journalistic in America, the Poynter Institute, has a handy checklist for obituary writers. After the top five (name, age, address, occupation, cause of death) comes Membership. Until this week, there would nothing I could truthfully include in that space (though why would that stop me?). Until this week, that is, when I found and then immediately joined the International Association of Obituarists. After all, if I'm going to do this then I may as well be qualified ($50 a year, no entry requirements).

"When I went to college, a real fascination with the obituary page began," confesses the IAO founder Carolyn Gilbert, who lives in Texas. "I found that some of my colleagues read, collected and critiqued obituaries too. So, in 1999, I decided to see if we could convene obit writers from the state of Texas for a conference."

Now they run a conference every year for any of the hundred or so IAO members from across the globe who can make it.

Earlier this year, in the small town of Las Vegas, New Mexico - otherwise known as the former haunt of Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid and Jesse James - a group of people gathered to talk about death. Andrew McKie from The Daily Telegraph turned up in a cowboy hat.

Gilbert describes the atmosphere of the conference as "a combination of a homecoming, a houseparty and a really lively wake."

"These writers are the most fun of any group I have ever been around!" she says. "There is nothing different between an obituary writer and a sports writer - except that the obit has a finite ending."

I can't tell if she's belittling or celebrating my goal. Even if I succeed in this quest, am I just going to be as memorable as a football result?

A curious membership of the International Association of Obituarists remains unexplained by his biographers, who assume he was merely a fan of the art, as no record exists of his ever having chronicled any of his friends' lives. But then so many complexities exist in the story of this remarkable fellow, himself a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a blanket.

Phew. I've nearly finished. Maybe I got just a little carried away, but then, as the great McG Thomas used to say, "Unless you got too far, how are you ever going to find out how far you can go?"

Now all I have to do is write the ending, type it all up, print it out, bribe a few newspaper juniors, sit back and just wait for my smug moment of immortality. You won't need me to tell you if I succeed. You'll probably read about it in the papers.

Ultimately he will live on in his achievements, his artwork, his invention of the Mindblower cocktail and the remarkable law suits that followed.

We shall not, as they still chant on the beaches of Tsikniti, see his like again.

(ends)