“Who’s Dead?”: A Profile of New York Times Obituary Writer Bruce Weber
“Vexing, complicated, and detailed,” such is the job of New York Times obituary writer and author, Bruce Weber.
In 2008, he returned to the New York Times from writing Life is a Wheel: Love, Death, Etc., and a Bike Ride Across America, a book chronicling his cross-country bike tour.
Out of the positions the NY Times offered him, Weber chose obituary writing, after previously having been everything from a theater critic to an editor.
Weber is one of the “only people in the paper who [isn’t] witnessing events from day to day.”
Every story he writes essentially begins at the end. While each obituary always contains news of a person’s death and the circumstances surrounding it, summing up the legacy of a life is no easy task. One difficulty lies in choosing whom to write about. When around 55 million people die per year, some decisions need to be made.
“Obviously we can’t do everybody,” Weber explained, “So who are we gonna do?”
He revealed that each year, he receives many suggestions from the public; yet, the NY Times publishes only 1000 obituaries per year.
“The way I try to explain [our selection process] is there are millions of worthy lives, but there are a lot fewer newsworthy lives. It’s not about who was more important… it’s about whose deaths our readers want to know about.”
The NY Times obituary staff also considers how “interesting” a life was. Weber offered an example of such a consideration.
“The guy who ran the last, most famous, and most legendary typewriter repair shop in New York might not be considered significant, but the story was incredibly amusing, and interesting, and eccentric.”
Therefore, he was given a spot on the list. In essence, those chosen to have their obituaries appear in the NY Times serve “…as kind of a collective report on the breadth of humankind,” according to Weber.
Another difficulty of his job is in balancing emotions with facts. A prime example of such a balancing act can be found in his obituary of Philip Seymour Hoffman that appeared on the front page of the NY Times earlier this year. There, he called Hoffman “one of the greatest actors of his generation,” which could be considered a relative statement. But, in this case, he clarified that for such a big story, he had the authority to make an emotive claim about Hoffman’s career.
“It’s my job,” Weber said, “It’s my job to seize the authority. Here’s why it’s on the front page. This is how I’m speaking for the New York Times how I’m going to characterize it. It’s my job to do it, so I did it.”
However, the hardest obituaries to write, Weber said, are about the people whose work of which he has no previous understanding before their deaths: the mathematicians, the scientists, and the innovators. Such pieces require additional research into subjects he is unfamiliar with in order to write an adequate and informative obituary.
Despite the challenges, Weber describes his job as rewarding and says, “I think my job has made me more fundamentally connected to other people in general. You can’t talk to grieving relatives day after day and not recognize how the universality of death contributes to our sense of a shared human condition. That there’s an especially gratifying thing about writing obits. That’s what it is.”
