The Power of Words. Gerry Goldstein: Making obits anything but routine

3/25/98
Gerry Goldstein: Making obits anything but routine

      Gerry Goldstein, the manager of the Providence Journal-Bulletin's South County bureau, was recently asked to explain how he wrote a gem of an obituary on a Duby Tucker, a lifelong resident of the area. Goldstein relishes writing obits, and he said his favorite is about a former police chief, Richard Colvin. Here's what Gerry had to offer about obit writing:
       Our routine for obits in this suburban bureau of the Providence Journal-Bulletin is that when somebody dies, the funeral home calls the information in to our office assistant. She does the writeup, but checks with me first -- I have covered the community for 35 years -- to see if the name rings a bell.
       Once in a while, a funeral director bypasses the office assistant and asks for me. When that happens I don't even bother saying hello. I just ask, "who?''
       I await the response with tension and -- how shall I put this so I don't sound depraved -- glee.
       I tense up because I'm about to hear that someone I know, and probably admire, is dead. I get excited because I'm about to face my favorite professional challenge: freeze-framing a lifetime in the newspaper version of tarpit amber -- a column of type.
       Mostly, reaction to this little interest of mine, obit writing, is positive -- so much so that some readers ask me to write their obituaries personally.
       But then, there was the widow of a flamboyant local police chief who called me, deep in her cups, 11 years after his obit ran to tell me how much she hated it -- and had seethed about it -- all those years because it included his foibles as well as his accomplishments.
       I pass the bulk of the obit along below because it's a good example of the tightrope we walk on the community level when, knowing that a family is grieving just a few blocks away, we attempt to write what amounts to a book review of a human life.
       Local character Clifford Tucker, whose recent obit is the reason I pen this essay on writing up the dead, lived for 101 years and really didn't do anything. It was how he didn't do it that made him special.
       He was a simple New England Yankee who loved a hearty supper of fried eels and got by in life shellfishing, running a little fish store, and watching time and tide pass him by.
       In one of my favorite lines from the obit, he once mused in an interview -- at age 95 -- that "The world's gone daffy.'' That's what most of us tend to think as we grow older and drift out of touch; I found his complaint touching and universal.
       That's what I look for in reprising a life; what can we take from it that's both basic and cosmic -- about values espoused or ignored; glories or failures and how they were abided; kindness or callousness; the impact of personality and character.
       Anecdote is crucial; thus we read how Clifford Tucker refused to make left turns across traffic, and drove to his destinations on routes that included only right turns because "I don't trust the other guy.''
       Tucker could have gotten three grafs as a non-entity. But it's satisfying to have given him his due because he was part of what makes this place special.
       Most lives, in one way or another, are special; it's just that some so obviously telegraph what we can achieve, or have suffered, or have overcome, that they move us when crystallized in print.
       I don't know how Saint Peter figures out what to write in his book, but I'm sure he's careful -- after all, he has a judgment to make.
       In our book it's easier; we take the rough diamond of a life as lived and rub away at it until facets emerge. Then the reader can hold it up and examine it -- turn it around and around and cogitate on just how much light it reflects.

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