The irony is that the art of obituary writing is dying. As newspapers die, with a few exceptions, so do the local obits. Seemingly small lives writ large—the ones that cause you to pause over your morning coffee, stopping midsentence in the kitchen, the smell of toast in the air, a finger wrapped around the handle of the cup, a vague memory, perhaps, of the last time you saw the grocer/dentist/mechanic—that pull you back to yourself, to the fleeting nature of life, to the shiver-inducing fact that that will be you one day, that it can and will all be taken away, that it can and will end.
