Late Notice

The obits as bittersweet discovery mechanism.

As far as I can recall, I had never heard of Todd Snider before last week, when I encountered his New York Times obit. The headline identified him as a “Folk Singer with Wry Wit,” which let’s just say isn’t really my kind of thing. But it made me a little curious, so I gave the obit a look anyway.

I’ve been an obits fan since college, which was a long time and a completely different media ecosystem ago, for two reasons. For many of those years I’ve kept a kind of log, recording my thoughts about notable (to me) deaths, and perhaps how the deceased intersected with my life, creating an elliptical form of personal journal. (I used to make some of this writing public through an annual zine, but I haven’t done that in a while.)

Snider would not have qualified for inclusion in that project because I wasn’t previously familiar with him. Instead, his passing turned out to be a clear example of my other motivation for reading obits that has developed over time: They can function as a kind of bittersweet discovery mechanism.