Heather Lende is the New York Times bestselling author of If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name: News From Small-town Alaska (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2005), Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs (Algonquin 2010), and Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons from a Small-Town Obituary Writer. Heather, who has five children and lives in tiny Haines, Alaska, has been a family and small-town life columnist and commentator for about twenty years, from Alaska’s largest paper, The Alaska Dispatch News, to NPR, the Christian Science Monitor, Country Living, and more, including Woman’s Day magazine, where she is a former contributing editor. She also writes obituaries for The Chilkat Valley News. Her essays are included in several anthologies. Heather is happy to Skype with book clubs, classes, or writing groups.
Heather is a graduate of Middlebury College.
In Her Own Words:
I have been writing obituaries for the Chilkat Valley News (the Haines weekly newspaper, and the best small newspaper in Alaska according to the Alaska Press Club), since about 1996.
The editor uses AP style, and a traditional obituary format, which I must follow. Also, there is usually another edit or two by the time they are in print. All of these except Glenn Frick’s and Rene Walker’s, which were paid obits in the Juneau Empirethat I wrote for friends, have been previously published (more or less) in the Chilkat Valley News.
I will be adding them here a few at a time, mostly starting with the most recent and eventually including them all, or at least the ones I still have in my files. There are a lot of good lives in these obituaries. It’s a privilege to write them.
If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name:
Tiny Haines, Alaska, is ninety miles north of Juneau, accessible mainly by water or air—and only when the weather is good. There’s no traffic light and no mail delivery; people can vanish without a trace and funerals are a community affair. Heather Lende posts both the obituaries and the social column for her local newspaper. If anyone knows the going-on in this close-knit town—from births to weddings to funerals—she does.
Whether contemplating the mysterious death of eccentric Speedy Joe, who wore nothing but a red union suit and a hat he never took off, not even for a haircut; researching the details of a one-legged lady gold miner’s adventurous life; worrying about her son’s first goat-hunting expedition; observing the awe-inspiring Chilkat Bald Eagle Festival; or ice skating in the shadow of glacier-studded mountains, Lende’s warmhearted style brings us inside her small-town life. We meet her husband, Chip, who owns the local lumber yard; their five children; and a colorful assortment of quirky friends and neighbors, including aging hippies, salty fishermen, native Tlingit Indians, and volunteer undertakers—as well as the moose, eagles, sea lions, and bears with whom they share this wild and perilous land.
Like Bailey White’s tales of Southern life or Garrison Keillor’s reports from the Midwest, NPR commentator Heather Lende’s take on her offbeat Alaskan hometown celebrates life in a dangerous and breathtakingly beautiful place.
Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs:
The Alaskan landscape—so vast, dramatic, and unbelievable—may be the reason the people in Haines, Alaska (population 2,400), so often discuss the meaning of life. Heather Lende thinks it helps make life mean more. Since her bestselling first book, If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name, a near-fatal bicycle accident has given Lende a few more reasons to consider matters both spiritual and temporal. Her idea of spirituality is rooted in community, and here she explores faith and forgiveness, loss and devotion—as well as raising totem poles, canning salmon, and other distinctly Alaskan adventures. Lende’s irrepressible spirit, her wry humor, and her commitment to living a life on the edge of the world resonate on every page. Like her own mother’s last wish—take good care of the garden and dogs—Lende’s writing, so honest and unadorned, deepens our understanding of what links all humanity.
Find the Good:
As the obituary writer in a spectacularly beautiful but often dangerous spit of land in Alaska, Heather Lende knows something about last words and lives well lived. Now she’s distilled what she’s learned about how to live a more exhilarating and meaningful life into three words: find the good. It’s that simple–and that hard.
Quirky and profound, individual and universal, Find the Good offers up short chapters that help us unlearn the habit–and it is a habit–of seeing only the negatives. Lende reminds us that we can choose to see any event–starting a new job or being laid off from an old one, getting married or getting divorced–as an opportunity to find the good. As she says, “We are all writing our own obituary every day by how we live. The best news is that there’s still time for additions and revisions before it goes to press.”
Ever since Algonquin published her first book, the New York Times bestseller If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name, Heather Lende has been praised for her storytelling talent and her plainspoken wisdom. The Los Angeles Times called her “part Annie Dillard, part Anne Lamott,” and that comparison has never been more apt as she gives us a fresh, positive perspective from which to view our relationships, our obligations, our priorities, our community, and our world.
An antidote to the cynicism and self-centeredness that we are bombarded with every day in the news, in our politics, and even at times in ourselves, Find the Good helps us rediscover what’s right with the world.
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Articles by Heather Lende on Alaska Dispatch News: http://www.adn.com/
The Inadvertent Grief Counselor | The Atlantic | Feb 16, 2016
Heather Lende has been an obituary writer at the Chilkat Valley News in Haines, Alaska, for two decades. Lende wrote a book, Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons from a Small-Town Obituary Writer, about her experiences and stories from the job she continues to do today. I talked with Lende about her job, why it’s important, and what it means to the people she’s writing about. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Bourree Lam: How did you get this job, and how long have you been doing it?
Heather Lende: I’ve been doing it since 1996, so that makes what, 20 years? I got it because I was working at our local paper, the Chilkat Valley News, which is a weekly, circulation 1,000. I was writing a column called “Duly Noted,” which is our boldfaced social column, for lack of a better way to describe it. [For example], if the Anderson family goes on vacation to Olympia, Washington, and then the names of the family and their children, and that they saw their grandmother who visits here in the summertime. Or weddings, or babies being born, or a picnic that happened, or a fundraiser or something like that.
I was doing that, and a friend of mine was dying. She got into a little tiff with the new reporter at the paper who was an investigative-journalism type. She just didn’t like him. In Haines, where we live, obituaries are news stories. When somebody dies, it’s news. She didn’t want the reporter writing her obituary, and she said so before she died. So the editor said “Heather, why don’t you do it? You write about alive people, you might as well write about dead people.” So that’s how I got it, and I’ve been pretty much doing it ever since.
Lam: How do you start writing an obituary, and how do you decide whom you write about?
Lende: Well it’s not just me, it’s the editor and the publisher of the paper. The idea is that it’s a hybrid of your standard obituary, plus a profile on the person. They tend to be longer than your standard family-written obituary—I’d say around 600 words. There’s always a photograph, and it’s a small town so we know when people die. Depending on the type of death—[for example, if it’s] the tragic death of a fisherman drowned—there’s a news story around that accident, but then I come in and write the story of their life, not the story about how they died. We usually try to do that in the same paper so that it’s not all the tragedy, because their lives are good and if they lose it, that becomes the headline. And that’s not necessarily how they want to be remembered, or how their family wants to remember them.
I do them primarily in person. I go to the home, talk with the family, I call friends on the phone. All of the obituaries I write, I know the person and I know their friends and neighbors. So even if somebody has been sick for a long time, I’m a hospice volunteer, so I know. That’s a separate thing, I don’t do it because of my job, but I found that being an obituary writer I’m kind of a grief counselor inadvertently. That’s what you do. So I got involved when they were founding a volunteer hospice … I’m one of the deathbed volunteers. Even then, there are all kinds of things that go on when people die, and a time and place to talk about it. I usually find that the obituaries tend to be on people’s to-do list: They’ve got to figure out the body stuff, the gravesite, they’ve got to get family members in and out of town. We live in a remote community, so they’ve got a lot going on and one of the things is “We’ve got to do the obit, let’s call Heather.”
Lam: Why do you think the obituary is so important?
Lende: I think they want to tell that person’s story, they want a good story to go out on. The language of [a typical] obituary tends to be almost Victorian—they’ve gone off to the angels, they never met a person who wasn’t a friend, beloved mother, sister, father—and that doesn’t really say anything. I think what’s different in the ones that I do, and our paper does, is when you write one that’s more of a profile it captures a little bit of that person and their story. People want to make sure that that’s out there. My obituaries aren’t great literature, but the family likes them. They’re done in AP style. They’re done in a small newspaper.
There’s a difference between someone who writes a check for college tuition for a neighbor’s kid, and someone who comes over at two in the morning and fixes a broken pipe—it tells you something else about them. It’s the specifics of it that makes it come alive for the family and the people. I’d like to hope that when people read the [obituary] they learn something about the person, about life or relationships, or a way they might want to be or not want to be.
Lam: I heard an interview with you on Here & Now, that the historical element of an obituary is also an important part of your job.
Lende: Well, that’s what I was told at the very beginning when I first started writing: The Chilkat Valley News was the paper of record. I don’t know now—with Internet and all these new media sources—if it still carries that same kind of weight. But my editor thinks it does and I do, especially in Alaska where non-native people come and go from different places. Maybefive years from now, someone is looking for their dad who came to Alaska when he was 25 and died here when he was 70 and had no contact with him. And if they can find my obituary, and it has some dates and names, they can help piece together their life or their history from what I’ve written about their dad and contact friends and people who knew him. I think that’s of real value.
Lam: What do you think of people asking each other, as a means of reflection or motivation, the question: “Well, what do you see in your own obituary?”
Lende: Frankly I think that’s kind of silly. There’s whole books now on visualizing your life by writing your obituary. I just think that’s weird. A better way to look at it would be: By essentially [doing] what you’re doing everyday, you’re writing your own obituary. I feel like you need to live an authentic life, and not worry about an obituary being the judgment, but more of an obituary being “See, this is how I lived in this time, in this place,” and take it for what it’s worth.
It kind of reminds me of high-school seniors trying to get into a college and writing essays that might not really reflect their actual goals and dreams, but they think that’s what the college admissions want or what their parents admire. And I would hope that by the time we get to be elders and have the privilege of composing an obituary and looking back on a life that we feel is worth documenting—that we have enough wisdom to not want to manipulate it.
Lam: I’ve read my own college-entrance essays (now almost 10 years later), and I think they’re really funny in that I can see some of the values at that point in my life.
Lende: Right, if you’re one of the fortunate few that get to live 10 decades or even seven decades, it’s done by then! You’re in the last inning. You can’t rewrite your life history the way you want your grandchildren to wish that you were. I think people live fascinating lives.
“I understand why you may think that what I do is depressing, but compared to front-page news, most obituaries are downright inspirational,” Lende writes in Find the Good. “People lead all kinds of interesting and fulfilling lives, but they all end. My task is investigating the deeds, characteristics, occupations, and commitments, all that he or she made of their ‘one wild and precious life,’ as poet Mary Oliver has called it.”
Experiencing death up close and on repeat has actually helped her identify and savor the positive parts of daily life.
“Writing obituaries is my own way of transcending bad news,” writes Lende. “It has taught me the value of intentionally trying to find the good in people and situations, and that practice — and I do believe that finding the good can be practiced — has made my life more meaningful.”
While obituary writers develop a unique appreciation for life and what it means to live it well, those who read them are able to gather similar takeaways. For example, Marilyn Johnson, the author of The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, is admittedly obsessed with reading obituary pages. She told NPR’s Renee Montagne that taking the time to read people’s stories after they’re gone makes her feel like she’s honoring them and their memory.
“They have made something of their lives, and we have judged it worth sharing,” she said.
In Find the Good, Lende highlights another upside to obituaries — they find a way to shed a positive light on tragic news.
“Whenever there is a tragedy, from the horrific school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, to here in Haines when a fisherman dies after slipping off the deck, awful events are followed by dozens and dozens of good deeds. It’s not that misery loves company, exactly; rather, it’s that suffering, in all its forms, and our response to it, binds us together across dinner tables, neighborhoods, towns and cities, and even time. Bad doings bring out the best in people.”
There’s nothing like the reminder that life is finite to encourage people to live it in the best ways possible.