And imagine how these people might also tip-toe around the pushed-up daisies with euphemistic circumlocution, although the days of calling a crashing bore a “tireless raconteur,” or a chronic alcoholic “affable and hospitable at every hour” are being left behind by some newspapers in favor of directness couched in understated mock-delicacy: “Miss [Hermione] Gingold had an endearingly individual approach to life. In New York she was regularly seen rummaging through other people’s dustbins.”

In a more sober vein, and in more focused and poignant studies, Johnson examines the effect 9/11 had on obituary writing. Confronted with such an unprecedented calamity and death toll, the New York Times’ Portraits of Grief really grew spontaneously, rising up out of the rubble. Though some would argue that they were more vignettes than obits, or “so goddamn sunny,” or comprised the “anti-obituary,” these memorial sketches filled a need, one obituary writer noted, for poetry: “In times of crisis... What we want to hear is a human voice speaking directly in our ear.”

Though some may not have seen it as poetry, that sense of humanity burst forth consistently in the down-to-earth obituaries of Jim Nicholson of the Philadelphia Daily News. Nicholson had the ability to zero in and precisely convey the personality of the deceased — and sometimes that meant, if he was writing an obit of a plumber, including a practical tip like how to unclog a sink. “He figured out a way,” says Johnson, “to make the obit porous and let some of the real world leach into the strict borders of the form.”

Nicholson is telling true stories of the individuals he writes about, and in similar fashion, Johnson, in her extended interview and visitation with the retired Nicholson at his home as he tenderly cares for his Alzheimer’s-stricken wife, lets a lot of the real world — with all its compassion and humor — into The Dead Beat.  This all-encompassing consideration colors her careful approach and articulated execution.

Moreover, this profound respect for the tradition and development of obituary-writing serves a profound purpose not entirely or necessarily at odds with the more lighthearted slant some obituarists take, a tack still in the service of exemplification and remembrance perfectly expressed.  "The better the obit," states Johnson, "the closer it approaches re-creation.  It's an act of reverence, a contemplation of this life that sparked and died..."