When my father died early this year, three days short of his ninety-second birthday, not an unexpected event, the family looked to me to write his obituary. I was the professional, after all. My first newspaper job had been as the obit man for The Waterbury Republican in Connecticut, where I'd knocked out a dozen or so obits a night for six long months, before moving on to the police beat. I could still do them in my sleep.

In those days the editors started you off on obits as a test of your commitment to the facts, knowing that relatives would be on the phone pretty quick if you'd dealt at all erroneously with the deceased. In my tenure I made only one horrendous error, involving a carpenter who had fallen out of a tree while sawing off a dead limb. His obit had run first in The American, our afternoon paper. Redoing it for the next morning's Republican, however, I neglected to change the "tomorrow" time for his funeral to "today," with the result that many of his friends showed up at the church, dismayed to learn that he had already been laid to rest under a large monument in Calvary Cemetery.

 What I liked about doing obits was you were writing for the ages. You knew the stories would be pasted in the family scrapbook, evidence that a life had been lived. A tree had fallen in the forest, and the paper had echoed the noise. I'd usually ask around to find out something interesting about people, not always successfully, to be sure. But I did uncover where one old guy had been a ship's rigger and had rounded the Horn a dozen times, where a 107-year-old black man had told his family he'd remembered people in the street talking sadly about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

 So anyway, I called the funeral home in New Britain, Connecticut, a factory town where my father had been born and raised, as had his father and his father's father and a lot of other Porters, where he worked most of his life as an executive of a small hardware company. I said I would be faxing an obit for submission to the New Britain Herald and also The Hartford Courant. And don't worry, I wouldn't get gushy; I knew the drill. There'd be nothing about his painful, life-long struggle with golf, his Yankee parsimony that made him drive us miles back to our cottage one summer because twenty-five cents worth of milk had been left in the icebox. No, just the bare bones - his college, the company he worked for, survivors.

 The two papers had been as integral a part of my father's life as his Roadmaster and the hulking coal furnace he wrestled with in the winter. The big news arrived in the morning Courant, Ike and the Korean War, that smart aleck Stevenson. Evenings he perused The Herald for the local stuff, invariably in his living-room chair, old-fashioned in hand. My own connection to The Herald came via Donny King, the paper boy, who hired little kids to run the paper from his bike bag up to people's front porches for a jelly doughnut a day.

Yes sir, an obit, the undertaker replied. How much do you want to spend?

Spend? I said. Pay for an obit? No, no, you must mean a death notice. No, he said, wearily, they've been charging for obits for several years now, not every paper, but a lot of them. The family gathers the information, the undertaker writes it up, at $1.90 a line in The Herald, $3.69 in the Courant, the more circulation the higher the price. Pictures cost extra, the amount depending on the number of lines they occupy.

 But this can't be, I protested, launching into a full-bore sputter. Papers not running obits? What's more basic than to tell readers who's dead or alive? Who, if not the local paper, is going to judge the scale and the nature of a town's loss? So now an editorial shrine can be erected to the owner of five Burger Kings, whereas the local poet dies unnoticed? Papers today aren't trying to make friends with readers, they're trying to infuriate them?

I could tell I was losing him fast, that he thought he'd gotten a regular Rip Van Winkle on the line. Mr. Porter, he cut in, did I want to submit an obit or not?

What would my father have wanted? He was a modest man, would have been embarrassed by a lot of bother, also happy to skip the expense, of course. I ended up buying $39 worth of obit from the Herald, $170 from the Courant. But when they appeared in print, the stories seemed somehow a little depressing. Getting attention paid and paying for attention aren't at all the same. You'd think people who run newspapers would be the first to understand the difference.

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