This wasn’t exactly the great literary career he’d imagined for himself. Not because it was a desk job – after all, there were certain benefits to a desk job, like subsidized health insurance and a dependable two weeks’ vacation – but because he’d imagined himself the next Hemingway, or at the very least, the man who wrote the headlines. Not the crowded back-corner obituary writer. Was there any position more lacking in glory?
But he had been surprised to find that there were stories here. Happy stories, even. The grandmothers who’d died at home surrounded by the comfort of large families. The couples who’d grown old together and passed away within hours of each other, asleep in the same bed.
And stories that broke the heart. The young man who died in a car accident on the way to his wedding. Three months later, his bride-to-be walked into the ocean. He wrote the obituaries for both. The little ones who burned with their house, whose parents came home to see flames licking the sky, who buried all three of their children the same day.
But most of all, he wrote the average, ordinary stories. Lives, played out in 10-point font on the inside back page of the paper. He wrote them all, and always took care to submit a copy to the family to ask if he’d gotten it right, if he’d captured their loved one with ink and paper. They were adrift in grief, but clung to this simple gesture. This mattered. Not to the world at large – the world at large hadn’t known Aunt Beatrice, hadn’t cared about Grandpa Joseph, wouldn’t notice if the details were wrong or omitted altogether. But these were lives he was recording. This had to be done right.
He took comfort in the ordinariness of their lives, took comfort in his own ordinariness, in becoming a kind of historian. Never was his work nominated for a Pulitzer, never did he get reprinted and held up as a master of his craft. He was merely the medium, the one who told the stories, but instead of feeling passed over, he felt honored. Years later, he still remembered the stories. He kept track of them, he bore witness. The files grew fat.