The Subject of death

A good post from the Economist correspendent site.Not a subject that gets a great deal of coverage and yet takes a fair amount of copy in the papers.

Yes what is it like to be an obituaries editor ?


Well perhaps something like this

"I DON'T know what other people’s first thoughts
may be on Monday mornings; but mine, as the jabber of my husband’s radio crawls
into my dreams, is “Has anyone died today?”
It was never so before I became
The Economist’s obituaries editor, four years ago. But death comes naturally
now. It is matter-of-fact. I keep a list, very incomplete, of those who are
creeping towards it. I notice its mark on people, not so much in wrinkles or
stooped backs but in a certain frailty and luminosity acquired by the very old
before they die. More than I used to, I note the premature browning of leaves
and grass, the erosion of statues and stones, the rotting of things. The odd
pangs and pains in my own body I now surmise to be Death knocking, or leaving a
calling card, with a promise to come back later."