Obituaries for Dina Merrill have appeared. None are satisfactory. An obituary is a notice of a death with a short biography. Can you write a biography of at least 200 pages, now? If not, yours is a death notice, or else condense your biography.
Suggestions for obituary writers:
1. Emulate the small-town sports writers whose accounts of the weekly high school football games related all that the home team had done well. The score was an afterthought.
2. Penetrate and unravel any obscurities, was there an arc of design? Write within a moral imperative. Support no cliques or claques. Neither be friend nor foe.
3. Don’t increase the consensus. Don’t compete with other obituaries.
4. Do you understand the events of the life? If so, what was their significance? If they were insignificant, according to you, then what is there to the life, if there was no significance? Better to forestall judgment, Hell exists, yet no one is certain who may be there. If you are certain of your afterlife and you could have done better given the deceased’s circumstances in their entirety, obviously I don’t want to hear it.
5. Do not attack those who can no longer defend themselves. Hardly fair. Then if you insist, even if you don’t know, I know you will die. Get this – all, who have ever lived, have died, no exceptions. The cold sober truth is that we don’t all die at the same time. I may outlive you. Then I can write what is not a proper obit of you.
[Currently incomplete first draft]. She was an heiress of the super-rich and a rebellious socialite who became a popular star as an actress. She had honest beauty and poise and elegance. She was a mother who gave time and money to charitable and artistic causes. Her sophistication did not exclude opposing acts of criminality. Her humor and apparent lightness of being were representative of part of an era that fostered better lives then than those to come. Of course, that’s not all.
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