Casseroles made and missed: Why so many obituaries honor this treasured dish

With her Department 56 Christmas village and mistletoe doilies in place, Lynda Finch spent last Christmas Eve cooking a smorgasbord for her family to graze on the next day. That night, with green bean salad, mashed potatoes, stuffed mushrooms, bacon-wrapped hors d’oeuvres and chile relleno casserole prepped and tucked into the refrigerator, Finch went to bed and died in her sleep at age 73.

From 'The New York Times': 'Lights, Camera, Obits!'

Obituaries, by definition, stare fixedly in the rearview mirror. Worse, they begin, as they must, with the bleakest of all possible announcements: Someone has died. Not a juicy premise for a film, one would suppose. Add to that the nature of the enterprise: gathering facts, arranging them, pressing the keyboard with one’s fingertips, cutting a few words and adding a few others. Except for the phone calls, it’s an inward-looking process, at least for the reporters. How do you make drama out of that? [Vanessa] Gould had a few ideas up her sleeve.

TED Talk: What Really Matters at the End of Life

Lux Narayan starts his day with scrambled eggs and the question: "Who died today?" Why? By analyzing 2,000 New York Times obituaries over a 20-month period, Narayan gleaned, in just a few words, what achievement looks like over a lifetime. Here he shares what those immortalized in print can teach us about a life well lived. (H/T Ellen Schiller)

The NYT's Margalit Fox on writing obituaries

That, in essence, is the deep, sometimes bittersweet pleasure of the job – the chance to see, through the lens of personal history, how the world, for better or worse, got to be the way it is.