For information on the death metal band, see Obituary (band).

An obituary is a notice of the death of a person, usually published in a newspaper, written or commissioned by the newspaper, and usually including a short biography. It is similar to a funeral notice, which is also published on the obituary page. A funeral notice is a paid advertisement written by family members, placed in the newspaper by the funeral home.

Writing obituaries

---

Because of the short time between the notification of a death and the next publication deadline, most newspapers have one or more clerks who specialize in typing such things as obituaries. Sometimes, this task is given to a cub reporter (often to allow an editor to evaluate writing and copyreading skills), although today many obituary clerks also have other duties (such as typing news releases and social news).

More on [ Obituary ]

The Economist: Obituary

Mahmoud Darwish, the voice of Palestine
Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:47:15 -0000
Mahmoud Darwish, the voice of Palestine, died on August 9th, aged 67POETRY exercises a special power for Arabs. To a people of desert origins, it takes the partial place of icons and cathedrals, stage drama and political oratory. Yet the Arab canon extends far wider, linking the tribal bards of pre-Islamic Arabia to Sufi mystics, bawdy medieval jesters and angst-ridden modernists. Poetry also carries a special meaning for exiles, who must sustain themselves with what they can carry, their lightest but most precious burdens being memory and language. Exile was certainly personal to Mahmoud Darwish. His first forced flight came in 1948, when he was seven. Fearing the advance of Israeli forces, his family abandoned their ancestral wheatfields in Western Galilee and walked, destitute, to the apple orchards of Lebanon. Sneaking back across the border later, they found their village razed to make way for Jewish settlement. His father became a labourer; his family, having missed a census, were classed as “present-absent aliens”. ...
Papa Wendo, a Congolese rumba singer
Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:49:44 -0000
Antoine Wendo Kolosoy, a Congolese riverboat mechanic, boxer and rumba singer, died on July 28th, aged 82WHEN Antoine Kolosoy sang “Marie-Louise” in the native bars of Leopoldville—Le Kongo, Congo-Moderne, Macauley—they said the dead woke up and danced. Some local Belgian priests took fright, and had him arrested. He was soon released, with a warning not to play the song again. But Mr Kolosoy, who was better known as Wendo, or Papa Wendo, and was one of Congo’s—and so Africa’s—first music stars, ignored this injunction. Wendo alingi komona mama Louise (“Wendo wants to see Miss Louise”) he sang, pleading for a fictional lover, Marie-Louise, whom he had named after a real-life girlfriend of his guitarist, Henri Bowane. Alas, a few weeks after this, the guitarist’s sweetheart had sickened and died. “Then he’ll show her to Bowane/Where are you, Louise?” ...
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, dissident and author
Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:59:56 -0000
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian author and dissident, died on August 3rd, aged 89PEOPLE knew it was there: the vast amazing country of Gulag which, “though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent—an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country.” Trains went in, and people were sent to administer it from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. But until Alexander Solzhenitsyn had spent eight years there, laying bricks and smelting metal in the intensest heat and cold, hearing fellow-inmates, like rats, stealing his food in the dark, wearing wrist-crushing handcuffs for the least infraction, this land was not fully revealed to the outside world. “The Gulag Archipelago” was a book carried out of the camps “on the skin of my back”, to bear witness on behalf of everyone still inside. Its appearance, in 1973, immediately led to his expulsion from the Soviet Union. But his work was done. He had exposed the fissures in the system, a truth-telling that had begun, 11 years earlier during the Khrushchev thaw, with the publication in Novy Mir of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. That tale began with the cacophony of reveille for the prisoners, “sounded by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail” through windows coated in frost two fingers thick. With that banging, even through their imperviousness, the Russian people began to stir to the evils of the cult of personality under which they had lived for too long; after this, though with desperate slowness, the disintegration of the Soviet state was only a matter of time. ...
Sarah Conlon, campaigner for the innocent
Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:10:21 -0000
Sarah Conlon, campaigner for the innocent, died on July 19th, aged 82GOD knows she did what she could to keep her son Gerry safe. She called him to be in by seven for his tea, to stop him thinking he might wander down to Gilmartin’s pub or to the card-schools on the corner, where a lucky coin or two might fall off the box in front of him. Each evening, until he was 15 and wouldn’t do it any more, they would say the rosary together as a family. She taught him his prayers, and made sure that in their house it was Jesus with his Sacred Heart who looked down from the wall, rather than Patrick Pearse or James Connolly. For a household in the Lower Falls, in West Belfast, they were not especially Republican. Sarah Conlon wanted their life to be respectable, holy, and quiet. It was her graft that held the family together. Up in the morning at seven to scrub the step and their own little section of pavement with scalding water, before she went to work. For years she sorted old clothes at Harry Kane’s scrapyard, amazed at the fine stuff people would throw away, jumpers and T-shirts perfectly good enough to pass on to someone needy; later she worked in the kitchens at the Royal Victoria Hospital, dishing out food to patients and mopping the floors. The hours were long, the pay poor; but work was hard to come by for Catholics in Belfast. ...
Bronislaw Geremek, Polish historian and politician
Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:04:30 -0000
Bronislaw Geremek, a Polish historian and politician, died on July 13th, aged 76 HAD he been in the West, Bronislaw Geremek said, he would have stayed out of politics. Safe in his enclosing study, with the lovingly filled and refilled pipe and the esoteric books, his fame would have centred round investigations of vagabonds in medieval Europe. Instead, because he was in Poland, he chose struggle. “The intellectual must be engaged,” he insisted. “We are fighting for the very right to think.” His life mirrored his country’s story, of disaster, reconstruction, freedom and frustration. And he shaped it. Without cultured supporters like Mr Geremek, the communist regime in Poland in the 1950s and 1960s would have been even less credible than it was. Without its wily mastermind, Poland’s opposition in the 1980s would have found it far harder to outwit its oppressors. Without “Bronek”, as his friends knew him, polyglot, tweed-clad and cosmopolitan, Poland’s return to the European family of nations would have been slower and less certain. ...
John Templeton, philanthropist
Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:29:20 -0000
Sir John Marks Templeton, investment analyst and philanthropist, died on July 8th, aged 95IF, ON any day over the past few decades, you had chanced to be strolling in the early morning at Lyford Cay in the Bahamas, you might have seen a wiry, determined figure power-walking in the sea. Keen as a whippet, his thin arms pumping, he headed into the prevailing swell. In his 80s, he would do an hour of this. In his 90s, he still managed 25 minutes. Sir John Templeton spent his life going against the flow. In September 1939, when the war-spooked world was selling, he borrowed $10,000 to buy 100 shares in everything that was trading for less than a dollar a share on the New York Stock Exchange. All but four eventually turned profits. In early 2000, conversely, he sold all his dotcom and Nasdaq tech stocks just before the market crashed. His iron principle of investing was “to buy when others are despondently selling and to sell when others are greedily buying”. At the point of “maximum pessimism” he would enter, and clean up. ...

Subscribe to Obituaries RSS feed