Dale Evans and Anne Morrow Lindbergh met all the requirements for obit nirvana. Her 1929 marriage to Charles Lindbergh was the lead story on the front page of The New York Times. Later, she wrote a presciently feminist book, Gift from the Sea, which spent 47 weeks at the top of The Times ' nonfiction best-seller list. Both women's stories had built-in dramatic tension. They owed their success partly to their marriages, yet both were so talented on their own that the marriages seemed to rob them of full credit.
Obits are, in a sense, arguments.
They make the case for why we should care about a particular life. The more space devoted to the obit, the better the argument has to be. A paper's obit decisions show what it deems truly important. If you want to know what a news organization cares about in life, just look at what it cares about in death. It took the Los Angeles Times, which really cares about show business, to do the definitive job.