Death had its perks.
One Thanksgiving, I received an 18-lb. sugar-cured ham. A trio of mournersonce gave me a huge lush fern. During the Christmas season, I receiveda shiny, colored tin of expensive chocolates and a sparkling brassholiday ornament. Then there was that time I ate a free lunch at the downtown Masonictemple and got a guided tour of the building --all because I wroteobituaries.

I never planned to write about death, especially in my first job out ofgraduate school. It wasn't on my Top Ten list of things to achieve beforeturning 30. With two degrees in journalism, I expected to be out in thefield, chasing fires, investigating illegal activities in seedy motels andtracking down politicians' illicit business dealings and messy personallives. I wanted to be Lois Lane. I wound up as Elvira.

My college dreams of Pulitzer Prizes hadn't prepared me for an obituary beat.Sure, I thought I could deal with death. Reporters imagine, some even thriveon, the worst--a multiple homicide, a plane crash killing 200 people, a blazethat wipes out an entire family. Big stories on the front page, leading tobigger "perspective" pieces and prestigious awards. Alas, I had towrite biographies of the dead.

I was working at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. As stories about PresidentClinton often have noted, this is a small city in a small state. Theproverbial six degrees of separation between any two people shrink to abouthalf a degree. Everybody seems to know or have some connection to everybodyelse. Gossip is an honorable pastime, and obituaries are an agreeable way tocatch up with old acquaintances.

For two years, I listened to sobbing, dignified, laughing, distraught--andsometimes just plain crazy-- survivors, all the while trying todecipher truth from grief-induced fantasies. Unlike so many of my newspapercolleagues, I never had the option of hearing the stories of my subjectfirsthand. For that I needed a Ouija board -- and nightly deadlines neverallowed for that kind of indulgence.

My editors even sent me to study under the guru of obituary writing,Jim Nicholson of the Philadelphia Daily News, and learn the secrets of retracingthe lives of the weird, the wacky and the wealthy. I came back asking all theright questions: What did they eat? What did they wear? What was abnormal orunique about them? Did they spend their lives trying to develop a cure forsome disease? Or did they ride the rails with hobos? And how exactlydid thedeceased come to be named Velvet Couch?

When my day was done, I had buried a father who never spent enough time withhis family, a Bohemian mother dying from cancer who did biblical scenes inneedlepoint on every pew in her church, a lonely artist who raced intoa burning house to rescue her five cats. I immortalized them in onecolumn ofnewsprint and went home exhausted, wondering who would die during the night.I never worried about whether I would have something to write about the nextday.

Death became me. I received kudos and memos from superiors. To friends andstrangers, I was known as the Obit Girl. I was the hit of any party,naturally dressed in black. As I held my glass of wine, co-workers, one afterthe other, would ask, "Oh, Angel of Death, who died today? How did they die?How old were they? Tell us everything." Morbid curiosity ruled, and I, theSpice Girl of the Dead, possessed all the answers about those souls departedfor the afterworld. More than once I heard from seasoned crime reporters, "Idon't know how you do it. Amazing. I could never do it."

Truth is, I really didn't know how I did it. I often woke up at 3 a.m.,sweating and paralyzed by dreams of the dead. I told no one that, as a child,I had feared death, funerals, hearses, caskets--and that I still heldmy breath whenever I drove past a cemetery. Even now, I go out of my wayto avoid a funeral procession on the highway.

I hid my sadness for the families I interviewed. My colleagues didn't knowthat at the end of the day I sat in my car, blasted the radio and let thetears gush from my eyes.

In my two-year tenure on the obit desk--before I burned out and asked foranother beat--I learned that death plays a funny game. For each byline, mymortality stared directly back at me. Every story toughened my heart a littlemore and numbed my emotions. I began to feel nothing except the wet tears onmy face at the end of a long, draining day. Every night, I crawled into bedbelieving that, in the end, death wins.

But after the crying stopped, I pondered this job and realized that I, infact, liked death's generosity. Besides the gifts, it provided me with localfame, and sappy, yet completely sincere, fan letters and phone calls.

My obituaries often were printed in funeral programs, glued intoscrapbooks andlaminated as bookmarks. Sources, even funeral directors, called to inform mewhen a fascinating or prominent person was at death's door. Some peoplephoned and begged to reserve a space in the column for their dyingloved one.

Over time, my colleagues no longer considered obit writing a lowly clerk'sjob. For all the tears, nightmares and eventual burnout, they could see thatI had connected with readers--day in, day out--on a deep, personal level.
Death had given me new life.