Some obituaries hit too close to home, even when you’ve never met the folks they honor. They hit even harder when you have. I’ve written obituaries for prolific anime scribe Keiko Nobumoto; WWE’s Windham Rotunda (Bray Wyatt); James Kaposztas, the man behind the first AMV; stalwart Funimation-era voice actor Mike McFarland; Audition author Ryu Murakami; and goddamn Akira Toriyama. Writing an obituary is like a mail carrier delivering another mail carrier’s mail. At some point, every journalist will be assigned one, knowing someone will someday be tasked with writing theirs. The hope is never objective perfection upheld with the absolute pinnacle of journalistic integrity, but to write an epitaph with care, dignity, and respect. Summarizing a complex life with immediacy into something tangible for a reader to go “oh no” during the lag time of their day, like Paul Revere, is an impossible, necessary, and beautiful task.
Obituaries are, by their nature, an impossible assignment. The pressure to summarize an entire person’s existence in 400 or so words mere moments after learning of their passing is wild. Still, an obituary is the most straightforward, formulaic form of journalistic writing, even if it was one I avoided as much as I could while I was in J school.
Start with a lede about the person dying, mention what they’re known for and the age at which they passed, add a nut graph expanding on the circumstances of their death, sprinkle in quotes from those closest to them, and end with a “kicker” on who they’re survived by. Unglamorously, it's a plug-and-play piece that many legacy media sites write in advance for famous people and occasionally oopsie-daisy publish by mistake. For all the formalities of an obituary, none can fully account for a person’s relationships, private joys and regrets, the lives they touched, and the braided contradictions that made them human.
The late Sir Patrick Stewart also wasn’t much of a fan of obituaries. In his 2023 memoir, Making It So, he detailed his own struggles with them while he was cutting his teeth as a reporter before trying his hand at acting.
“I think that what wore on me most was writing obituaries—or, rather, reporting them," he recalls. "These were not of anyone famous, but of ordinary, working-class Mirfield folk who lived in houses like the one I’d grown up in. Usually, these write-ups were a single paragraph long."
He would knock on the door of the family of the deceased and usually get invited in for tea. The interview would take about 15 minutes. “Then came the moment I dreaded,” he writes. “With a tenderness and a strange pang of need came the inquiry, 'Would you like to see him/her, love? He/she looks real grand."
The sight of dead bodies sent him back to the newsroom ashen-faced. A seasoned reporter told him there was an easy solution: “When you’re asked to see the body, you say, ‘Thank you so much, but I have just had a death in my own family, and I think I’m still too upset to do what you ask. I hope you will forgive me.’”
While I’d never be invited to see the deceased when writing an obituary, I would marvel at how my colleague, Mateusz Janik, delighted in taking on obituaries in our newsroom. I wouldn’t discover until this year what drove his affinity for writing them. The lesson was that life is bigger than an obituary, and that’s their beauty. They don’t create closure. They’re an inciting incident, allowing the world to chip away at discovering or rediscovering a stranger or a celebrity as a person.
Obituaries are actually invitations, not conclusions to someone’s life. The heart of every obituary is why someone mattered. They’re a preserved record of what they contributed to society, making a mountain out of the molehills of their existence and retroactively transforming their mountains into monuments to the people they were, be they for good or for ill. In the years since my aversion to obituaries, I’ve found their paramount purpose is to encourage curiosity about the person they honor beyond the brief headline alerting the world to their passing. It’s not the last time a publication, and by proxy the world, will write or hear their name; they’re an aspirational or perhaps cautionary tale, a mirror in which you measure who they were as a person against who you are.
As an assignment, journalists' positions as witnesses, participants, fans, and professionals following the lives of public and private citizens make them the best people to write their epitaphs. As noted above, I’ve written a ton of obituaries for folks since graduating from Columbia. Many of them happened in the middle of the night, with the journalistic pull that no one but me could do an obituary justice for folks I’ve never personally met but have been affected by in a major way from their contributions to society through their art. That said, journalists are not immune to grief when tasked with the awesome responsibility of penning an obituary. Sometimes we simply can’t bring ourselves to do it. No death in the string of celebrity passings (as they’re wont to do) has shocked me quite as starkly as the passing of longtime Looney Tunes voice actor Eric Bauza.
Isaiah Colbert
While writing about voice actors—a profession I nearly pursued instead of journalism in college—I stumbled across Bauza for a feature on sound-alike actors. After watching a clip of him talk about being a soundalike for Antonio Banderas’ Puss In Boots, I took an interest in him, so much so I cited him as an example of the importance of a person mastering their craft not being cheapened and replaced by AI. Serendipitously, I got the chance to interview Bauza earlier this year during the press tour for Coyote Vs. Acme. Despite all the celebrity names like John Cena attached to the film, and by proxy, my bucket list of once-in-a-lifetime interview opportunities, I took more interest in picking Bauza’s brain with questions I accumulated about his craft. How could I not? He’s the voice of Bugs Bunny.
As I’ve noted before, press junket interviews are a drag. Despite all the reasons time crunch, hot-seat ensemble interviews suck, Bauza gave me a small moment of respite. A moment of kindness I might’ve expected a coastal-city version of myself to be afforded before being shuffled out of the room: he didn’t just say hi when my square entered his Zoom meeting. He hit me with a “What’s Up, Doc?” Sure, he probably said it to every interviewer he chatted with in his marathon-style junket; he was no doubt as tired of coming up with different ways to answer permutations of the same questions he'd answered moments earlier, but it brightened my day to get a hello from him.
In our seven-minute virtual interview (coupled with director Dave Green), I made a point to give Bauza his flowers by asking what it meant to immortalize longtime voice actor Mel Blanc through his own work as the torchbearer filling the shoes Blanc left behind for his Looney Tunes characters. Rather than talking himself up, Bauza expressed humility, lauding Blanc as unambiguously great. As an actor, Bauza wasn’t concerned with getting his flowers in that moment. He was focused on paying it forward.
“He’s a beacon. Mel Blanc was such a force as far as performers go. And in the world of voice-over, he was a pioneer. I equate him to human bagpipes. He had air coming out of every oropharynx on his person. Unmistakable, one voice from another—they’re so different. So unique,” Bauza told me. “I always say Warner Bros. gave me the keys to the Cadillac, and I always promise not to scratch it and put it back with a full tank of gas. Being able to act in those roles on a bigger scale —not a thirty-second shoe commercial, or even a seven-minute short harkening back to the originals—is something special. I’m super grateful for Dave putting me in that spotlight for his story.”
The shock that Bauza passed wasn’t that he did so at 46 from hypertensive cardiovascular disease, but how much more weight the words he imparted gave me. I don’t need obituaries to think about the creeping anxiety of death; I’ve got infrequent anxiety attacks that’ll do that for me. Usually when I’m at my most comfortable, a mind goblin will chime in my ear, telling me, “you’ll have to live through dying someday.” It's unfun to have a queue of celebrity obituaries compound the ritual of being empathetically distraught over their passing, turning it into a what-if mirror of yourself or a loved one. It’s kinda hard to enjoy the page of the book you’re on in your life when your mind flips to the end and asks you to ponder how you’ll meet the moment.
Although the above serves as a universal knee-jerk reaction to abhorring obituaries, obits are a necessary pain. The real value of obituaries is communal moments of reflection and introspection. While I never asked Mateusz what drove him to enjoy writing obituaries, I discovered why I take pride in writing them. Obituaries present a communal trance where everyone has no choice but to think about the end. As generations age, admired figures are gonna die. The joke-y response, is that celebrities we’ve lost, like Dolly Parton, at the tender age of 80, were “just a kid.”
Even if a statement like that is just a joke, I find it to be emblematic of what obituaries do. Even when their life has ended, obituaries act as a kind of cultural DMT, where the world plays a blissful montage celebrating one’s life through social media posts and shared clips and anecdotes from their time with the royal Us as if they were born and died at the same moment in time. From that come conversations about mortality, where we confront capital Q questions about our lives and the lives of our loved ones.
Granted, celebrity deaths are vastly different from the death of a family member. They’re a stranger to you like any other, yet through obituaries, even the absence of a stranger seems to be experienced by everyone at once as a necessary pain. One where, through repetition, we might greet death, humanity’s greatest stranger, as a friend like Tim Curry.
The beautiful contradiction about death is that everyone will know what it is like, but no one will ever be able to tell us. In place of an impossible answer to an impossible question, obituaries become one of the few public rituals where the dearly departed become anecdotes, making sense of how we’re all briefly gorgeous on earth.
