Covid-19 And The Age Of Obituaries

When her dear friend Sadia Dehlvi passed away last week, author Rakshanda Jalil offered to write an obituary for The Indian Express. “Over the years I’ve become the go-to person for obituaries when any ‘Urdu’ person dies,” she says over the phone from Delhi. “I wrote Sadia’s within two hours of her passing, it was my way of coping,” says Jalil who takes the responsibility of paying posthumous tribute very seriously. “An obituary can’t be trite and banal even though you may have to write it in a ridiculously short period of time.”

“Some of us wear various hats,” Jalil says, musing over whether she would want her obituary to focus on academic achievements or contain insights like, “She was a woman who loved to wear flowers in her hair.”

It was all of the above which prompted her to ask what she described as a “ghoulish” question on Facebook: “How many of you wonder, should there be an obituary for you one day, who would you want to write it?” Nearly 100 people replied.

At a time when death occupies center stage, Jalil’s question is one that many may already have pondered. From millennials recording their last will and testament and emailing it to friends via WeTransfer to folks mourning the loss of family in long, cathartic posts on Facebook, death seems within arm’s reach everywhere you look.

In the United States, many family members are using obituaries as an effective tool to highlight the failings of government officials.

“Losing loved ones during Covid is the hardest,” Dastkar chairperson Laila Tyabji wrote in one of her weekly Facebook round-ups of life in these strange times. “One longs to hug family and friends and share the pain, say a prayer, to take a last glimpse of a cherished face, deck the pyre or grave with flowers.... Without these small rituals there’s an abyss, without means of closure.”

Some media organisations are going the extra mile to tell the stories behind the numbers. In May as the U.S. death toll neared 1 lakh, The New York Times filled its front page (and two inside pages) with details of 1,000 people who had died due to Covid-19.

It excerpted personal details of victims from newspaper obituaries across the country, some as simple as “an exuberant laugh” or “her size belied her strength and spirit”. The newspaper also runs an ongoing series titled Those We’ve Lost.

Inspired by this, a recent edition of Mumbai Mirror doffed its hat to 56 Mumbai police personnel who had succumbed to the virus. Head constable Sandeep Surve’s wife Shweta told the newspaper that Sandeep, 52, “always treated me like a queen”. The night before his death, weakened head constable Sanjay More, 53, chatted with his family over a WhatsApp video call. Surendra Pol, 49, christened “Mr Helpful” by his colleagues, was going to buy himself a car on his 50th birthday.

When the end gives you notice, some people may take on the weight of recording their own lives. Like the unforgettable book-length obituary When Breath Becomes Air that Dr Paul Kalanithi wrote after he discovered, at 36, that he had inoperable lung cancer. The memoir, published in 2016 after Kalanithi’s death, got its title from this poem:

You that seek what life is in death,

Now find it air that once was breath.

New names unknown, old names gone:

Till time end bodies, but souls none.

Reader! then make time, while you be,

But steps to your eternity.

In 2015, journalist and former colleague Mayank Austen Soofi began an experiment with self-obituaries on his popular The Delhi Walla blog. He asked people to write their own obituaries in 200 words and launched Our Obituaries with his own.

“I’m obsessed with death and the continuing lives of people as they exist in the memories of those they leave behind and also their lingering presence in the material world,” Soofi says. “Every time I grow attached to people I imagine how it would be like when they will no longer be here.”

In the replies to Jalil’s post, some people said they would prefer to write their own obituaries. Others picked from a wide pool of already dead-but-not-forgotten stars such as author JD Salinger and poet Robert Louis Stevenson who wrote Requiem. As for me, I’m addicted to the Economist obituaries though, unlike Soofi, I don’t have a stash of 10 years worth of torn out last pages.

Someone recollected Saadat Hasan Manto’s way. The author and playwright wrote his own epitaph: “In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto buried, and buried with him lie all the secrets of the art of storytelling in his breast. Weighed down by maunds of earth, he wonders still: Who is the greater storyteller, God or he?” His family replaced these words with something less controversial and Manto ended up having no say in the words that were written on his tombstone.

As the words swirling around after the suicide of actor Sushant Singh Rajput get increasingly vitriolic, film director Neeraj Ghaywan can’t stop thinking and tweeting about the deaths that are occurring unnoticed in a parallel India for where nobody records lives lived and lost.

“Nobody will write about them, no prime time perversity, no angry hashtags for justice, no dignity, just a cold shroud of apathy to cover their bodies,” Ghaywan tweeted, sharing a Press Trust of India tweet about a 42-year-old labourer who lost his job in Mumbai during the lockdown and returned home to Madhya Pradesh where he killed himself and his three daughters by jumping into a well. “Thanks to this fiercely orchestrated amnesia, people have forgotten about migrants,” Ghaywan says over the phone.

Often, the obituaries we don’t read are as important as the ones we do.

Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and is on the editorial board of Article-14.com.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.