The art of writing an obituary

Whether it's Fidel Castro's mistress, a particularly slippery carp or the man who says 'mind the gap' on the London Underground, Ann Wroe has written obituaries for them all.

For the past 20 years, Wroe has been "catching souls" for The Economist.

Finding the essence of the person was the key, she told RNZ's Afternoons, rather than simply the chronology of a life.

"I always find this a very unsatisfying way to approach a life. A better way for me, at any rate, is to focus on what they thought was important about their lives and what they felt passionate about."

In the case of the great playwright Arthur Miller, it was his hobby rather than profession that unlocked the subject, she said.

"His passion was carpentry, rather than writing plays.

"I thought this is just fascinating, because, in fact, if you look at the skill needed to produce a perfectly jointed table and chair, perfectly balanced. You've got a parallel there with making perfectly constructed plays. So that was a very nice theme to explore through my 1000 words."

She would much rather write those 1000 words about less famous, but interesting subjects, she said.

"Sometimes, of course, there's people you can't avoid, a Pope or a president or some really important person.

"I must say, my heart sinks when I'm told to write about them."

Most of the time, Wroe said, she picked her own subjects.

"I look at the obituaries in the New York Times and also in The Daily Telegraph in Britain."

Readers would often give her tips, she said.

"Some of the ones I most enjoyed doing have been on suggestions from readers. I remember one in particular about a sailor in Polynesia who was the last man who could find his way across the Pacific without a compass. Mau Piailug is his name.

"He was wonderful. I would never have known about him, but someone wrote in and said 'what about this?'"

Life, she said, "catches on possessions". In the case of 'Naty' Revuelta, a former mistress of Fidel Castro, archival pictures of her helped frame the obituary.

"She fell on hard times, and she had lived in a wonderful house in Vedado, which is the swanky part of Havana, and she had little coffee cups, little handle-less coffee cups.

"She had pictures of herself all over the wall. She played tennis and canasta all the time, was much sought after by young men, she was very beautiful."

After Castro left her, she fell on hard times, Wroe said.

"In some pictures she's in a much, much downgraded flat in one of those sort of crumbling, damp blocks you get in Havana.

"And I just found looking at those possessions and seeing the difference in the status she'd once had was fascinating."

All of her obituaries had left "a little bit of a mark", she said.

"There are some real favourites, like the man who says 'mind the gap' on the London Underground.

"I really liked him, especially the way with his wife, who was also a public announcer, they used to have conversations at breakfast, like 'we apologise for the late running of the toast'. I really loved that."

Other subjects were less appealing, she said.

"Osama Bin Laden, I got into enormous trouble writing that obituary, mostly with Americans, as you can imagine, because they think that only good and worthy people ought to get obituaries.

"You can't always do that. Sometimes people who have been very famous in the world, [who] need an obituary, are pretty nasty."

In the case of the notorious Jimmy Savile, she avoided writing his obituary by "fluke".

"When he died, I mean I never liked him, I always thought he was creepy, but he was a big name in television, and so I thought 'I'll go and get his autobiography out of the library'.

"I really didn't like it. It wasn't that it was explaining or describing any horrible practices, it was the whole tone of it. There's something about his relationship with his mother that really made my skin crawl."

She decided she could not do it.

"Thank God I didn't, because that was before any of the stuff about paedophilia, Stoke Mandeville Hospital and all that, before any of that came out."

Benson the carp, however, was a particular favourite. Benson had been caught 48 times by various anglers then put back again. Finally, one hot August week, Benson died, she said.

"This fish was famous, there were stories about her death in a lot of the newspapers, not obits, exactly, but certainly accounts of it.

"And what was nice was that you had a lot of pictures of people with her all the fishermen who'd caught her, and it was lovely because I could describe them from underwater.

"I had more fun with that obituary than I have ever had."

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