I don't recall when I first learned that newspapers prepared obituaries in advance, or the sheer number they keep on tap ready to publish upon confirmation of a famous person's demise, but it fascinated me enough to write about the entire macabre enterprise. Hence, "The Obituarist". (I was also juiced by a Peter Orner writing prompt to write a fictional obituary. You can read the final result of that here.)

Slate magazine published the inside scoop on obituarism after the North American Review accepted "The Obituarist" but before it was published. Although my numbers and dates are a bit off, I was surprised how close they came to the New York Times' 1,200 "advancers", the oldest dating back to 1982. (My number of ten thousand was way off, however.) In retrospect, I was lucky.

My computer tallies the obituaries I've written. An hour ago, like a grisly odometer rolling over, my computer reported to me "5,000 items, 107.48 MB total." Five thousand obituaries, all revised and updated on a series of frustrating personal computers I've owned since the start of my tenure in 1978. So quirky and surprising I called my editor to relate the news. He uh-huhed me and humored my numerology until I announced I was quits. It was time to retire. He began to talk me out of it, then acquiesced. I told him to find a replacement and send him over so he could begin my entry. There are flexibilities with and within my profession, but writing one's own obituary is bending the reeds too far.

The rules: What are they? Who laid them down, who decided what should be respected and what could be glossed over? To have played the game so long, and yet be unable to elucidate its boundaries and limitations. Some can be surmised. Some arise out of necessity.

Obituaries are written before the subject has died. Journalistic deadlines are unforgiving. Research consumes precious time. I happen to work for a daily that archaically employs fact-checkers, and as undermanned as they are, they do not brook sloppiness.

After my obituary has been fleshed out and revised and prodded and proofed—here is why my profession is so odd—it's filed away in a folder on my computer called The Freezer. My subject is not dead, after all. Publication awaits a heart attack, a drug overdose, a plane crash. A missed step on an icy set of stairs outside a packed Georgetown auditorium. A broken neck twisted gruesomely in the snow, the limousine driver aghast at the fall he's witnessed, a double-click of my mouse, and the politico's obituary arises from The Freezer, ready for its final revision and publication.

My editors and I have a little list, The Nearly Departed we call it, celebrities and politicians and artists and authors whom we agree are not long for this world. The unlucky are crossed off the list the same day their obit hits the back pages of the Times. The unluckier are the ones added when that slot opens. There is no announcement, no press release of their addition. My subjects are not informed privately. We guard The Nearly Departed, not even speaking of it around lower staffers. Is it out of etiquette or some nobler purpose we do not make public my current research? Or is the reason as crass and self-serving as legal protection? Ah, there is a rule to this game I am unsure of.

I interview their colleagues and relatives under a variety of pretenses. Ethically I'm bound to supply my name and the name of my publisher, but beyond that, ethics take on a certain ... plasticity. When I say I need a quote for the Sunday supplement, which Sunday? Which supplement? And my name means little to anyone outside of the Times. Of the thousands of obituaries I've choreographed into print, not once have I enjoyed credit. At the Times, obits are bylined to "The Editors." It takes a peculiar modesty to pen the death notices of the famous and infamous. It takes even slimmer pride to gallop down to the newsstand and slap through the pages to locate the six column inches of your painfully sculpted prose. When someone famous dies, there's whole milk in my cappuccino.

There are others like me at the Times, but none with as much experience. I've written five thousand obits, but my colleagues are developing thousands more as well. The Times is prepared for at least ten thousand celebrated lives to expire. Of the glitterati and politicos within my sphere, only thirty-five hundred or so have expired. Those remaining fifteen hundred obituaries are on ice in The Freezer waiting for that special phone call from my editor. The liver transplant didn't take. Or: Dropped dead on the back nine. Or: The pack-a-day finally caught up with him. Fifteen hundred unpublished obituaries is a sweet chunk of intellectual property, as the Times' retained lawyers say.

I maintain and revise obituaries for eight, sometimes twelve years. Maintenance consumes much of my time, for the type of elderly I follow are forever hunting up one more notable achievement to stuff and mount. The fire that drove them into the public sphere decades ago burns on. Famous novelists hire ghostwriters to scribble their supposedly pithy observations on the state of American letters. Former Presidents who think they're still in office make statesmanlike trips to Africa and Southeast Asia and sometimes even Kansas. A once-notable chef says something honest and direct when a reporter is in earshot. (Washed-up alcoholic chefs are the most honest and direct people in the world.) These last-chance events can be condensed to one or two sentences, and will be, because the noteworthy in the life of the long-famous never happens just prior to death. Those that die without warning (those not Nearly Departed), their obituary is handled by a staff reporter. James Dean's death was not detailed by a professional obituarist. Elizabeth Taylor's will be. It's open in my word processor this very minute.

Five thousand obituaries, thirty-five hundred in The Morgue, fifteen hundred waiting for a lub and no dub. A heartbeat ceasing is tacit permission to publish. Death seals an obituary shut.

Most of the stories in The Freezer will be published after my death. There is irony in there somewhere. When I understand that irony, perhaps I will have accepted my mortality. It has not happened yet.

The young man arrived forty-five minutes late. This city's bus system is fucked, he griped, and he mentioned some business about a pothead roommate and the cable television bill. He eyed my cigarette and loathed, "Oh ... you smoke." I stubbed it out knowing then and there it was to be a tedious afternoon.

He asked for coffee when I offered tea, and so I set about brewing a pot. He meandered my apartment's sitting room studying its details, his canvas messenger bag hanging pendulously down his back. He tilted his head to scan the spines of books on my wall shelves, and he rubbed the leaves of my potted plants to verify they were not thrift mart plastic. Then he sniffed over my writing desk, perhaps surprised someone like me didn't have a Remington Rand and dusty frayed copy of the OED. Nefertiti circled the young man with her quivering tail crooked into a question mark. She sized him up as much as he'd been evaluating me.

When I returned with coffee and sugar cubes and cream, he was laying out on the magazine table a pocket writing tablet and a dictation recorder and a notebook computer. Disposable pens scattered about made a plastic logjam between all of it. The young man was using his incisors to unseal the batteries he needed for the dictation recorder. He grunted through bared teeth "Thanks" when I set the coffee before him.

I'm sure my editor spoon-fed him a list of questions to ask, the script I've followed literally a thousand times, and the young man failed to deviate. My birth date, my age, my parents and their occupations. Where I grew up, my high school and alma mater, the name of my childhood pet dog. It was the manner of his asking, the weariness of a deadening routine that he could not have fallen into yet. He thought he surprised me when he confided this was his first obituary. I confided in return this was good practice and an unusual opportunity. No obituary I've written did I consult the subject directly. How many dorm mates and burned agents and scorned lovers have I interviewed? How many afternoons have I spent combing newspaper morgues and dipping into old Life interviews and memoirs of dead friends?

"The challenge lies in the small details—finding the humorous anecdote or a witty quip," I said. "But the sport is in the revision. Distilling a person's life to four or five grafs. Concise writing has become a bit of a black art."

He clicked off the dictation recorder. Some J-school notion of on-the-record, off-the-record, I gathered.

"This isn't what I signed up for," he said.

"Then what?"

"I want to do sports."

"Reporter or columnist?"

"Columns, of course. Columns are where it's at."

I reached forward and started the recorder. I spoke to the box, not him. I told it of the novels and short stories I've written, and the File-a-Folder in my bedroom closet crammed tight with rejection letters. Only one positive note from Minneapolis, an editor's praise of a poem of couplets and a promise of "the issue after next", but the review lost its funding. In 1987 my then-wife wrote me from Toronto that she'd fallen in love with a new-age therapist, and that's in my File-a-Folder too, along with my love letters she returned and travelogues of our trips to the Florida Keys and the Pacific Northwest. Forty-five years of literary aspirations and twenty-two years of marriage all stored away in a cardboard box. There's a couple of metrics for you, I said to the recorder.

I half-completed a biography of William Shockley that an agent lost on a trip to Maui. So distraught and superstitious of what it portended, I destroyed the carbons and abandoned the endeavor. I wrote a synopsis for a teleplay on the life of Pope John Paul II that I was contractually denied receiving on-screen credit for, and their lawyers leveraged that clause to deny me compensation. Other than my obituaries, the only payment I ever received for my writing was a five thousand dollar check a Hollywood studio paid me for a treatment on Oppenheimer's life. They never produced the movie. I spent all five thousand dollars on a trip to London and relished every hard-earned minute of it. I flew the Concord, drank bitters to last call, debated Reaganomics with a Thatcherite, and returned stateside with a Thomas Hardy first edition in my luggage. I leapt up and found the volume on my shelves. I spread open the frontispiece before him. He recoiled as though the book stank of rot, but I'm sure it was out of distaste. Where did this manic display come from? I still can't tease it out. I shook the volume as way of offering it to him. Dust motes smoked up and clouded in the failing sunlight. He accepted it, noted the illustration with a shrug, and set it aside. He clicked off the recorder.

"You never wanted to write obituaries either, did you?"

"Ask me a question worth answering." I started the tape recorder.

He sat back. "You never wanted to write obituaries, did you?"

"I've had the pleasure of delving into the lives of first ladies, character actors, felons, even one-hit wonders. Biographers argue. Obituarists explain."

"I guess I see obituaries as slow-pitch softball. Have you ever written something nasty about someone? You know? Kept it real?"

I counted with fingers. "Pinochet. Pol Pot. Nixon. Castro."

"Castro's not dead."

"I've written his life story in the past tense."

Out my window, three stories down, the park reclined out and away toward the setting sun. He looked out over the treetops and down at the electric lamps slouching over the paths. He stared for a long while. I lit a cigarette and placed my favorite ashtray on my armrest. Nefertiti leapt to my lap and set the dynamo in her throat running loud. Finally he faced me.

"But those are powerful men," he said. "They did a lot of damage, I suppose, except maybe Castro. Who are you? I've never heard of you, and I doubt anyone else has either. Why do you get an obituary in one of the biggest papers in the country?"

"A number of years ago, I accepted the position you now occupy from another older man, a man I thought as crusty and Victorian as you probably see me. Me and my editor—my first editor—we spoke well into the morning hours teasing out ... the obituary. As an ideal. Its purpose. Its core. And when we finished we struck a gentleman's agreement. When I pass away, I get an obituary. I can't write it, of course. Fair's fair. That, we agreed, I had to trust to my successor."

"Huh. Old Boys' Club."

"Yes," I snapped. "The Old Boys' Club. Apparently the stuffing has come out of the club chairs, though. Apparently today anyone can manhandle the decanters and drink the premium Scotch."

"How's that?"

"Apparently the Old Boys' Club couldn't drum up a successor with aspirations beyond quipping wise in a column about a linebacker's taste in women, or writing a poor pastiche of the baseball commissioner meeting Babe Ruth in Heaven."

It took him that long to understand he was being mocked. He got to his feet and said the interview was over.

"Please," I said. "You're too young for this sort of display."

He collected his tools into his messenger bag. "Getting an obit when you're dead. It's that important to you."

I waved my cigarette through the air, making what I thought was a smoke trail of casket-aged melancholy and hard-earned wisdom, all to emphasize a grandiose statement I'm too embarrassed to pass on to you. Instead, I closed my lips over the filter and dragged with a smile. I'd said enough.