Legacy Matters

What Next?

The obituary editor of the Economist reflects on death and the afterlife in The Glad Reaper.

Lives as they are lived are far from neat. But the summing up of a life in a thousand words needs the imposition of a shape, and a circle is as good as anything.

Although I write biographies in my spare time, I’ve never been happy with the chronological or longitudinal form. I seldom read biography for fun, and when I do it’s in a strange way: first the childhood, usually until the subject falls in love, and then the death. Sometimes I read no more than that: the beginning and the end. It seems to me that these are the times (before the chaos of existence really closes round) when the essence of the person is most naked and exposed. We see who they are.
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In this strange age―where we fear death from left-behind back-packs and parked cars, and where we watch the deaths of strangers on the evening news but shrink from attending the deaths of our friends―obituarists have the easier cases. I deal generally with natural mortality in lives full of years and doings. But whether death comes slowly and privately, or randomly and publicly, its cause is not what most interests me. The vital question is, what next?