Bob Hope was dead, and I was feeling kind of responsible. It was Monday, July 28, 2003. Word had filtered in that the 100-year-old funnyman had finally passed away just the night before, after famously outliving his New York Times obituary writer.
A couple of weeks earlier, my photo-editor friend David had given me a mailing from some stock agency. It was a batch of black-and-white Hollywood pictures, classic comedians perhaps, and David knew I liked old-timey things. So this vintage image of Bob Hope was sitting face-up on my desk at work. And then all of a sudden, he was dead. I felt bad.
I grabbed my scissors, clipped the photo of Hope out of the mailing, and taped it to my office window, which looked out on the cubicles. It was a little tribute of sorts. I didn’t give it another thought.
Until Warren Zevon died, that is. It was a little over a month later, on September 7. Zevon had meant a hell of a lot more to me than Bob Hope ever did. And I had one of those thick-paper jewel-case wrappers from his final CD. So I clipped off the front panel and taped it to next to Bob Hope.
Five days later, Johnny Cash died.
Now I had a “thing” going. If somebody who had made an impact on my life passed away, I’d find a photo on the Internet, print it, clip it, and tape it up. Sometimes I’d use the color printer, sometimes black-and-white. It was kind of fun, this “Wall of Death,” and besides, it kept nosy people from peeking into my office.
By the end of 2004, the collection had gotten pretty sizable, so I took a photo of the photos, peeled them all off the window, and re-taped them onto sheets of plain white office paper. For archiving.
On January 1, 2005, former U.S. Senator Shirley Chisholm passed away, and we were off to the races once again.
And so it continued, year after year. Put ’em up, take ’em down. A lot of coworkers really enjoyed the Wall. A couple of people may have thought it was morbid or something, but that was really very few. And any weirdness or darkness about it never crossed my mind. Those couple of minutes—finding a photo, printing, clipping, taping—it was sort of a memorial act; the least I could do for someone who had meant something to me. And I was getting better at the procedure, more efficient. I learned how to resize pictures in iPhoto. This helped a lot, because I wanted the size of the photo to be relative to that person’s “importance.”
My last day in the office each year became a nice quiet ritual. I waited till everyone else had gone home, took my keepsake photo, and then began methodically removing and storing the images. It was a chance to review who we’d lost. (Watching awards shows “in memoriam” segments, I’d keep a little tally of how many I’d also posted.) And did I end up with more or fewer archived pages than previous years? (Surprisingly, though some years definitely felt “busier” than others, I tended to reach about the same number each time.)
However, the ends of years could also be a little tricky. I usually worked till the very end of the year, but still, with weekends and holiday days, I would hope not to miss anyone “big.” In 2004, just after I took down that first group of photos, I learned that famed clarinetist Artie Shaw had passed on. I was still in the office, so I quickly printed a photo, taped it up, photographed it, and then immediately took it down again. And then Friday, December 29, 2006, was a real challenge: Would Saddam Hussein be executed over the weekend? I couldn’t miss Saddam Hussein! So before the official photo, I put Saddam up on my computer screen in the background.
Some coworkers took a real interest in the Wall. “Did you put up so-and-so?” They were always impressed when I’d beaten them to the punch. Sometimes I’d be encouraged to get a photo “ready,” but to me, that seemed morbid; I didn’t want to jinx anyone.
Then, on October 17, 2008, I made a small gesture, with no idea what I was getting myself into. I’d just heard that Levi Stubbs, lead singer of the Four Tops, had passed away. So I went on Facebook (where I was now spending more time than on Myspace), and wrote:
Before I knew it, I had become the R.I.P. guy. Friends counted on me to break the news of celebrity deaths; they were disappointed when there was a delay because I was at the gym or watching a movie. Colin, John, and Wayne will routinely e-mail me a heads-up of famous passings; Colin wakes up super-early so he often gets a jump on overnight death announcements. Posting R.I.P.s sometimes feels like a burden, like I have to do it. But when I take a step back, I do still enjoy it, that fleeting electronic moment of tribute.
In early November of 2011, I left the job where I’d been for 19 years, and had maintained a famous-deaths window for nine of those years. It was a pretty sudden departure, and extremely emotional. One of the things that genuinely weighed heavily on me was the five-sixths-completed Wall of Death for that year. My last day was a Friday, and I came in on both Saturday and Sunday to pack up the bizarre assortment of personal belongings that I’d accumulated over the years. On Sunday night, I repeated the ritual one final time: photograph, peel, archive.
Back in my apartment, I slowly began going through the cardboard boxes filled with items that, for one reason or another, had made their way to the office. There was a plastic bag of childhood toys, books, and papers which I’d brought back from a visit to my parents’ place a few years earlier. Thumbing through some three-ring looseleaf paper, I was somewhat shocked to discover a collection from my junior year in high school—circa 1985–86—which I’d totally forgotten about:
And those “permanent exhibit” names went back to at least 1981. This can’t have been a school project, but if not, what the hell was it? On the following pages are carefully Scotch-taped obituaries, one per sheet, clipped from the Trenton Times. There’s Samantha Smith, schoolgirl “peace ambassador” to the Soviet Union; Johnny Carson’s mother, Ruth; game-show announcer Johnny Olson; Dan White, who murdered Harvey Milk; Karl Pettit, inventor of the water-cooler paper cup; Bill Scott, voice of Bullwinkle; Johnny Cash’s father, Ray; Sammy Davis Jr.’s musical director, George Rhodes; Joseph Oriolo, creator of Casper the Friendly Ghost; and Olympic volleyball star Flo Hyman.
What’s that they say?
Child is father of the man.
You see, some things never change. They just repeat. Except the actual dead people. Because they stay dead. But your creativity is eternal.
“Sometimes I’d be encouraged to get a photo ‘ready,’ but to me, that seemed morbid”
I had a laugh over that.