Ask Not For Whom the Bell Bings

November 1, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens. N.Y. 

On All Saints Sunday we pause to remember friends and loved ones who have never really been out of our hearts and minds. Parents, siblings, spouses, colleagues, neighbors, people who were very important in our lives and left a big hole when they were gone.

Possibly – just possibly – not all of these folks were saints who lived exemplary, unselfish, sacrificial lives and went around doing good. There will be no feast days to honor the passing of souls we loved. To go a bit further, some of us had relatives who are, in George Carlin’s reckoning, not smiling down at us but grimacing up at us.

But Lutherans don’t have to worry whether grandpa, who tended to spend Sunday mornings recovering from Saturday nights, had made it into the Good Place. Grandpa was, to put it Latinly, simul Justus et peccator: simultaneously a saint and a sinner. As are we all.

Over my decades as a journalist for church publications and newspapers, I worked under an editorial code. If word of the death of an older person crossed my desk, I would consider it natural causes and pound out an obituary for the morning edition. If, however, the decedent was in his or her teens or twenties, the code was to investigate and report what happened.

If the decedent was a well known person, such as the mayor or police chief, we wrote the obituary years before they died. This is common practice in all media outlets so we would have all the biographical information ready to go.

Every media outlet I know has an obit file so staff writers won’t have to dig all night for facts and sources if the police chief can’t be Heimliched in time.

Macabre as it may seem, even church news offices have files of obituaries of church leaders still breathing. When I worked for the National Council of Churches I was particularly proud of an obit I wrote for Billy Graham years before his death. But Billy lived most of a century and by the time he died I had written statements lamenting his death for three succeeding general secretaries

Pre-death obits are a time-saving device in the age of instant communication. The only problem with keeping them locked and loaded in your computer is the danger of releasing them too soon, as when the reports would be, in Mark Twain’s words, exaggerated. I remember an instance in which the death of the mother of a church bureaucrat was prematurely reported, requiring a retraction reporting she was no longer dead. Sure, the story had a resurrection ring to it, but no one in the church expects to see that kind of thing more than once.

In the halcyon days of typewriters and mimeographed press releases, time seemed to move slower and the risk of premature obits was not as great. On the contrary, sometimes days and weeks passed before the obit saw the light of day.

In the fall of 1972, former President Harry Truman – a Baptist –lay dying. My editor in the American Baptist Division of Communication, Dr. Frank Sharp, asked me to write an obituary of the former president that quoted notable Baptists. It seemed as if Mr. Truman’s passing was imminent so I acted quickly. I called Harold Stassen, a prominent American Baptist who had once been a serious contender for Mr. Truman’s job. Mr. Stassen immediately agreed and the next day I received a nice tribute written in his own hand on lined yellow paper. I typed the quote into the story and waited. And waited.

President Truman lingered for weeks and after a while the obituary sank deeper into my In-Basket. By late December, Truman’s illness had disappeared from the papers and we closed the American Baptist offices for Christmas.

I don’t remember what I did Christmas Day 1972, but I remember December 26. I was awaked at home by a phone call. The baritone voice that never needed amplification was Stassen’s. The New York Times had just called him for a statement.

“Truman’s dead,” Stassen rumbled. “Where’s the darn obit?” (He really said darn. That’s the way he talked. He was a Christian gentleman and, besides, his decibel level didn’t require cussing.)

I drove quickly to the office to pull the obit out of the pile and called the impatient Times obituary editor and read it to him over the phone. Truman’s death, of course, made the front page. I don’t remember if they quoted Stassen or not. But we tried.

This month, when Dolores Huerta, Susan Saint James, Noah Adams, and Walter Koenig died, their obituaries had already written, filed and ready to go. No one had to lose sleep or drive to the office to pull it out of a dusty file. Those days are gone forever. And I, for one, don’t miss them.

There are, of course, celebrities and politicians of prominence that I hope will be around for many years and it is not pleasant to remember that their obituaries have been written, too. It’s a consequence of the age of instant media. It’s fueled by our need for instant intellectual gratification, the same impulse that has turned “Google” into a verb.

It is a little strange to spend hours documenting a person’s death years before it happens, but perhaps there’s an up-side to that. Motivational speakers make fortunes encouraging us to live each day as if it were our last. Maybe the way to do that is to add a line or two each day to our premature obits. And, of course, remember to leave the obits where an editor can find them.

On All Saints Sunday we pause to remember friends and loved ones who have never really been out of our hearts and minds. Parents, siblings, spouses, colleagues, neighbors, people who were very important in our lives and left a big hole when they were gone.

Our prayers drift up like incense to thank God for the gift of these lives, and for the reminder that the time will come when our obits will be writ, the bell will bing as our name is read out, and we will join these beloved sinner saints in the great cloud of witnesses over heaven.