“She turned to the obits first. Sports fans turn to the sports page for the scores. She was a death fan. She read everyone, including the listings. She learned about the deaths of uncles and aunts of people she barely knew. Losses of high school friends she never saw. Some death consumed space. Famous figures. Infamous. Peculiar. Some deaths the living fought to have recognized by the Times. She knew of people who worried about how long their obits were going to be. They worried they wouldn’t get a full column. They wanted a picture. Pictures were usually taken twenty years, on average, before the person’s death, which meant the person’s achievements were made twenty years before, then they disappeared from public view or they didn’t want to be photographed later, older, otherwise there’d be a more recent picture available. Columns of print about the dead next to pictures of their relatively young faces.”
— p. 96. No Lease on Life. Lynne Tillman.
