Breathing New Life into the Obituary - Columbia Journalism Review

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One day in the fall of 2022, Izaak Opatz, a musician in Montana, was scanning the obituaries posted on the websites of local funeral homes when he encountered a striking photo: a man in his late fifties or early sixties with long, wavy hair who somewhat resembled The Dude, from The Big Lebowski. His name was Terry Holo; he died on March 6, 2022, at the age of seventy-one. From the accompanying obituary, by Bob Holo, Terry’s brother, Opatz learned that Terry had been obsessed with cars, basketball, and weightlifting. As a kid, he once sneaked onto a movie set. Later, he had troubles with drunk driving, served as a surrogate father to several kids, and once persuaded Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie to autograph his joint. “He just seemed really approachable, even though I knew he was gone,” Opatz told me.

You’ll hear those details, and many more, in the first episode of The Obit Project, a podcast about the lives of Montanans cohosted by Jad Abumrad, a cocreator of Radiolab, and Jule Banville, a journalist and professor at the University of Montana, where she has taught obituary writing for more than a decade. With The Obit Project, Banville wanted her students to reimagine the obituary as a medium for exploring universal truths: what it means to be human, the beautiful moments shared between friends, deciding when it’s time to let go. Banville’s students, including Opatz, created seven of the twelve episodes; five professional writers did the rest. Banville and Abumrad partnered with Montana Public Radio, which hosts the podcast on its website and airs some of the episodes on Sunday evenings.

For Abumrad, the podcast is a response to what he views as a particularly dysfunctional moment in history. “There’s always a question of how to respond to a world gone mad,” he said. “Strangers noticing one another and doing it with kindness,” he said, “feels like one way.”

By their nature, audio obits can explore the rich layers of people’s lives, told through the voices of those who knew them best. There’s a particular intimacy in hearing those voices that can’t be achieved in print. Through interviews, music, and archival audio, The Obit Project takes you on a journey, sometimes literally: at least one episode, which takes the listener to a Western railroad town called Dillon to meet an elephant named Old Pit, feels like a sonic road trip. Another features the story of a Montanan fighter pilot who disappeared in Vietnam.

In conventional obituaries, there’s some distance between the writer and the subject. Abumrad encouraged students to close that gap—to become part of the story. “I chose Terry because of these similarities with my own life, as far as not having a linear career and starting a family early and being a little bit on the fringe of what’s considered traditional,” Opatz said.

Banville and Abumrad, former colleagues at WNYC, dreamed up the show over a dinner in Missoula in October of 2021. “I started talking about how I make my students report and write these obits about strangers,” Banville told me. “They typically have a life-affirming experience when people let them into their homes.” Abumrad asked her, “Why isn’t that something we hear?” Soon, they began scribbling down on a napkin what an obit-related audio project might sound like.

Banville saw the reporting process as an opportunity to find the humanity in each story, the thread that pulls through someone’s life. She pushed her students to track down interviewees, knock on doors, and make phone calls to friends and family of the deceased. Banville wanted them to probe: Is this person a good story? Is there some tension there? “It’s really about making strangers feel things about other strangers,” she said.

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“There’s something kind of beautifully, quietly subversive in that,” Abumrad told me. “It’s like you’re asking people to notice one another.” Before The Obit Project, Abumrad had never written or edited obituaries, though some of his projects have been obit-adjacent, such as Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, a podcast about the Nigerian Afrobeat icon and political activist, who died in 1997. Now a distinguished research professor at Vanderbilt University, Abumrad has said he’s drawn to projects animated by “a spirit of collectivity and joy” that allow him to experiment with form.

Abumrad and Banville want listeners to feel moved and delighted by the stories they hear on The Obit Project—and hope their podcast becomes a new model for the form. As Banville told me: “We hope this inspires people to figure this out where they live.”

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Meg Dalton is a freelance journalist and audio producer...