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Friday, September 22, 2017

Beyond the Grave - A Posthumous Gift


Don Tirso de Irureta Goyena in Manila circa 1911


My daily-delivered NY Times has an interesting little essay today called Inside the Times on page 2. These essays give an extraordinary look at how the Time’s newsroom works and how editorial decisions are made. Today's featured a little story by Stephen Hiltner called An Obituary Written From Beyond the Grave. It is about how sometimes obituaries are written before their subjects are dead and the strange occurrence of the obituary writer dying before the person featured.

The essay can be found here.

Antonio, Tirso and Filomena - 1916

 It gave me thought of my mother’s often told story of a dollhouse given to her by her father for her birthday. Below is the poem my mother, Filomena de Irureta Goyena wrote on the magical event.

About those posthumous obituaries Daniel Slotnik, a senior news assistant on the obituries desk told Hiltner, "There isn't anything specifically different with the process, except that obviously there's no writer to send a final draft to."