• Patrick Stewart has died after a "brief" battle with Alzheimer's and Lewy body dementia. He was 86.
• Stewart was one of the most prolific actors of his generation.
• He was best known for playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard in "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

Any actor will tell you that they'd be lucky to play a character long enough — and iconic enough — to become beloved by generations of fans worldwide.

Patrick Stewart had two.

The acting legend, who died on October 28, 2026, at the age of 86, played Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the captain of the USS Enterprise in the "Star Trek" franchise, for 36 years. He played the character from the premiere of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" in 1987 through three seasons of "Star Trek: Picard," which concluded in 2023.

Of course, that's not the only character Stewart will be remembered for.

In 2000, Stewart was cast as Professor Charles Xavier, aka Professor X, the kind, yet complicated, telepathic leader of the X-Men. He went on to play Xavier eight more times in the X-Men series. He reprised the role for what will now be the final time in "Avengers: Doomsday," which is set for release in December.

In addition to Picard and Xavier, Stewart was a prolific theater actor and was knighted by the Queen in 2010 for his services to drama. He was a Shakespeare devotee, as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1966 to 1982. He also kept many of us sane during the pandemic by reading one of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets a day and posting them on Instagram.

Here's a look back at his 60-year career, onstage and on screen.

Before Patrick Stewart was on TV or in movies, he was a stage actor.

Stewart's first professional acting credit was in 1959 in the play "Cyrano de Bergerac." He then became a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966.

He made his Broadway debut in 1971 in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

He was nominated for five Olivier Awards, winning three. He was also nominated for a Tony and three Drama Desk Awards, winning one.

His first Olivier nominations both came in 1979. First, for best actor in a revival of "The Merchant of Venice," which he did not win, and second, for Best Supporting Actor in "Antony and Cleopatra," which he did win.

He won twice more: In 1994 for Best Entertainment for his one-man production of "A Christmas Carol" and in 2009 for Best Supporting Actor in "Hamlet."

His Tony Award nomination was in 2008 for best actor in a play for "Macbeth."

His Drama Desk win was in 1992 for his one-man version of "A Christmas Carol."

He appeared in dozens of productions in both London and New York.

It's impossible to list all his theatrical roles, but he was a true giant — so much so that his colleague and future close friend Ian McKellen told him that he shouldn't throw his stage career away to star in some sci-fi TV show.

"'No!' he said. 'No, you must not do that. You must not. You have too much important theater work to do. You can't throw that away to do TV. You can't. No,'" Stewart wrote in his memoir, "Making It So."

Of course, that sci-fi show was his big break.

His big break came in 1987, when he was cast as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

Before "The Next Generation," there had been just one captain of the Enterprise: Captain Kirk, as played by William Shatner. Stewart had some large shoes to fill, but, as he would've said, he made it so.

Stewart played Picard for seven seasons of "TNG," plus an appearance on "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine."

"TNG" became a deeply respected and beloved series, even garnering an Emmy nomination for best drama series in 1994 — a feat that wouldn't have been possible without Stewart's stewardship. He was also nominated for a SAG Award in 1994 for outstanding actor in a drama series.

"Without question, Jean-Luc is the most significant role of my career. And I will be forever grateful to have had the opportunity to be a part of what is now such a historic franchise," he said in 2026.

He played Picard in four films, including "Star Trek: Generations," in which William Shatner passed the torch to Stewart and his crew.

Stewart starred in four "TNG" films: "Star Trek: Generations," "Star Trek: First Contact," "Star Trek: Insurrection," and "Star Trek: Nemesis."

In "Generations," Stewart and Shatner appeared onscreen together, with Kirk giving Picard some advice on holding on to the captain's chair.

Shatner posted a statement on X after the news of Stewart's death, writing, "Sir Patrick Stewart was a friend, a colleague, and a magnificent actor. From the stage to the bridge of the Enterprise, he brought intelligence, grace, and a deep sense of humanity to everything he did. Captain Picard stood for the best of us, and so did the man who played him. I was filled with affection and admiration for him and his work."

After an 18-year break, Stewart returned to Picard and starred in three seasons of "Star Trek: Picard."

Many "TNG" fans were less than pleased with how we left the crew of the Enterprise in 2004's "Nemesis," which is considered a low point for the franchise.

So, Trekkies everywhere were thrilled when news of "Star Trek: Picard" became public. Stewart reprised his role for three seasons, concluding in 2023.

In 2000, Stewart began playing Professor Charles Xavier in the "X-Men" film series.

The only other role that could rival Captain Jean-Luc Picard is Professor Charles Xavier, the leader of the X-Men.

He appeared in "X-Men," "X2," "X-Men: The Last Stand," "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," "The Wolverine," "X-Men: Days of Future Past," "Logan," "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness," and "Avengers: Doomsday" as the telepathic, preternaturally wise mutant.

On set, he befriended his costar and fellow legend, Ian McKellen. The two became fast friends.

The two were so close that McKellen officiated Stewart's wedding to his wife, Sunny Ozell, in 2013.

In addition to playing Xavier and Magneto, the two also acted together onstage in productions of "Waiting for Godot" and "No Man's Land."

Stewart and his costar Hugh Jackman also had a close bond, which was on display when they reunited for the 2017 film "Logan."

Xavier and Logan (aka Wolverine) had a particular bond throughout all the "X-Men" films, and it seemed that continued offscreen.

The two reunited for "Logan," which, at the time, was thought to be their final hurrah as the two mutants. It became one of the best comic-book films of all time, with Stewart even getting Oscar buzz, though he lost out on the nomination.

"We lost one of the greats of stage and screen today," Jackman wrote on Instagram after Stewart's death. "And, in my book, a tremendous friend and man. I learned so much from him. I will miss you, Patrick Stewart, all of my days."

One of Stewart's other longest-running roles was in "American Dad!" He appeared in over 120 episodes across 22 seasons.

MacFarlane, the creator of "Family Guy," "American Dad," and Ted," among other shows, is famously a huge Trekkie. His shows constantly reference "Star Trek," and he frequently got members of the cast to voice themselves on "Family Guy."

But with Stewart, he took it a step further, casting him as Avery Bullock, the unhinged deputy director of the CIA, on "American Dad."

He also narrated the two "Ted" films.

Patrick was one of those icons who we somehow all took for granted would always be with us." MacFarlane wrote on X. "We have lost a legendary actor today, and for many of us, a good friend. He will be deeply missed by the entire planet.

Stewart was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2010 for his services to drama, solidifying his status as a British national treasure.

"The knights of the theatre represented to me not only the pinnacle of the profession but the esteem in which the profession was held," he said at the time, per the BBC. "To find myself, to my astonishment, in that company is the grandest thing that has professionally happened to me."

He is one of 95 actors who have been bestowed the honor, according to People.

He was also a torchbearer at the 2012 London Olympics.

Being a torchbearer is a huge honor, especially when the games are in your home country.

"I have attended world premieres of big movies that have not had the excitement, and the sense of pleasure and pride that people are exhibiting today," Stewart said. "It was thrilling. I shall never forget today."

In July, Stewart said, "I can't imagine ever officially 'retiring.' I'll always and forever be an actor."

One of Stewart's final interviews was with TV Insider in July 2026, which he did to promote his new audiobook, a recording of Shakespeare's sonnets.

When asked whether he would ever retire, Stewart said no, though he noted that parts for people his age were few and far between. But he did shout out one of his final voiceover roles — and he had quite a varied voiceover career — in the series "Bait," in which he voiced a pig's head.

His final role will be this December in "Avengers: Doomsday."

After playing an alternate version of Xavier in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness," Marvel confirmed back in March 2025 that Stewart would be reprising the original Xavier in "Avengers: Doomsday."

"It was a true privilege to know him and to work with him. His legacy lives on not only in decades of extraordinary work, but in the many, many people he mentored. He will be deeply missed," Marvel head Kevin Feige said in a statement.

Robert Kelker-Kelly, the actor best known for playing Bo Brady on "Days of Our Lives," died from arteriosclerotic heart disease, the St. Charles County medical examiner confirmed to Fox News Digital.

The medical examiner ruled his death natural.

Kelker-Kelly, who also worked as a professional pilot, experienced chest and left arm pain shortly before his death at age 62, according to a St. Peters Police Department report obtained by Fox News Digital.

'DAYS OF OUR LIVES' STAR ROBERT KELKER-KELLY IGNORED ALARMING SYMPTOMS BEFORE SUDDEN DEATH: POLICE REPORT

His wife, Allison Kelly, told police she picked up her husband from Spirit of St. Louis Airport at approximately 7:30 p.m. Oct. 3. During the drive home, Kelker-Kelly complained of pain in his chest and left arm and asked her to pull over so he could vomit, the report stated.

Kelly asked her husband whether he needed to go to the hospital. He declined, instead asking her to take him home so he could lie down.

After arriving at their Missouri residence, Kelker-Kelly changed his clothes and got into bed. He continued experiencing pain and asked his wife to get him an aspirin, according to the report.

When Kelly returned from the kitchen, she found her husband unresponsive and not breathing.

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She immediately called 911 and began performing CPR, the report stated.

St. Peters police and the St. Charles County Ambulance District responded to the home shortly after 8 p.m.. Paramedics attempted lifesaving measures, but Kelker-Kelly was pronounced dead at 9:09 p.m.

According to the report, Kelly told investigators her husband had no known medical conditions and was not taking prescription medications. She also said he had not had any serious injuries or had surgery during the previous year.

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Police told Fox News Digital at the time that investigators found no suspicious circumstances at the scene.

"Mr. Kelly had reportedly complained of chest pain shortly before becoming unresponsive, and the circumstances appeared consistent with a medical event," police said.

The St. Charles County Medical Examiner's office released Kelker-Kelly without requesting further investigation, according to the report.

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Born April 18, 1964, in Wichita, Kansas, Kelker-Kelly built a career playing characters in several of daytime television's best-known soap operas.

He began his soap opera career as Sam Fowler on "Another World" in 1987 before joining "Days of Our Lives" in 1992.

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Kelker-Kelly took over the role of Bo Brady from original actor Peter Reckell, replacing an actor who had helped establish the character on the long-running NBC drama.

He remained on the series until 1995 and won the 1994 Soap Opera Digest Award for outstanding lead actor.

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After leaving "Days of Our Lives," Kelker-Kelly joined the cast of ABC's "General Hospital," playing a different kind of character.

He portrayed Stavros Cassadine, a villainous member of the powerful Cassadine family, from 2001 to 2003. He later reprised the role in 2013 and 2014.

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• Actor Patrick Stewart has died at 86.
• His rep announced he died after "a brief and poignant journey" with Alzheimer's and Lewy Body Dementia.
• Stewart was known for his stage work and roles in "Star Trek" and "X-Men."

Legendary actor Patrick Stewart, known for his roles in the "Star Trek" franchise and "X-Men" films, has died at age 86.

A post on his official Instagram page announced Steward died at his Los Angeles home on Wednesday, "in the loving care of his beloved wife Sunny, following a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's Disease and Lewy Body Dementia."

"He has been held in the warm embrace of family and friends, surrounded by live music, prayer, tears, laughter, and the kind of profound emotion that only he could inspire after a lifetime of devotion to us all," the post continued. "We will forever cherish the peaceful ease and reflection on his face, an enduring reminder of his invincible grace."

In lieu of flowers, the family requested that memorial contributions be made to Johns Hopkins Alzheimer's Disease Research Center Fund and Alzheimer's Foundation of America Caregiver Resources.

Born on July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, Yorkshire, England, Stewart became interested in acting at age 12, when an English teacher introduced him to William Shakespeare's writing.

Although Stewart initially dropped out of school at age 15 to work as a journalist, he quickly abandoned that pursuit and began performing in theater productions. He graduated from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in 1959.

At 26, Stewart joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he spent much of the 1960s establishing himself as a celebrated stage actor. He made his Broadway debut in 1971 in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and would go on to perform in over a dozen stage adaptations of classics like "The Tempest" and "A Christmas Carol."

"I knew from before drama school that Shakespeare was my great love," Stewart told Playbill in 2010.

Alongside his stage work, the actor also launched his TV career in the '60s — but his big Hollywood break came two decades later, when he landed the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard on the series "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

The sci-fi show lasted for seven seasons between 1987 and 1994. Stewart also reprised his role for an episode of the show "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" as well as several more movies, including "Star Trek Generations" (1994), "Star Trek: First Contact" (1996), "Star Trek: Insurrection" (1998), and "Star Trek: Nemesis" (2002). He also did voice work for "Star Trek" video games.

Stewart would go on to star in another popular franchise, Sony's "X-Men," making his debut as Professor Charles Xavier, a telepathic mutant and founder of the X-Men, in the 2000 movie "X-Men."

Ian McKellen, who was also a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company in the '60s and '70s, starred opposite Stewart in the original "X-Men" series as the powerful mutant Magneto.

Despite playing onscreen rivals, the two actors became close friends in real life, with McKellen officiating Stewart's 2013 wedding to singer Sunny Ozell in Reno, Nevada.

"We became good friends as a result of shooting multimillion-dollar adventure movies," Stewart later told NPR of McKellen.

Stewart's most recent roles included voice work for the animated series "American Dad!" and the 2026 movie "The Sheep Detectives." He reprised his role as Jean-Luc Picard from 2020 to 2023 in the series "Star Trek: Picard," and returned as Charles Xavier in 2017's "Logan," 2022's "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness," and the forthcoming Marvel film "Avengers: Doomsday," out this December. The blockbuster will mark his final onscreen appearance.

Despite starring in multimillion-dollar movie franchises, Stewart returned to the stage throughout his career. He was nominated for a Tony Award for his portrayal of Macbeth in the 2008 Broadway revival and starred opposite McKellen in two-play repertory productions of "Waiting for Godot" and "No Man's Land" in 2013 and 2014.

"I have often heard actors say, 'I can't afford to go back to the theater,'" Stewart told NPR. "I look at a lot of the work that I do in film and television — which I love — but, at the same time, it underwrites and supports the other work that I want to do."

Stewart did not see his onscreen work and his stage work as at odds; on the contrary, he described his two most recognizable roles, Picard and Xavier, as "entirely complementary" to his theater career.

"The techniques are different, and the rhythm and pattern of the work are different, but the approach to how I act doesn't change — the fundamental thing is to pursue the truth," he told Playbill.

Stewart is survived by Ozell and his two children, Daniel Stewart and Sophia Stewart, from his first marriage to Sheila Falconer.

Sir Patrick Stewart, the legendary British actor best known for portraying Captain Jean-Luc Picard in "Star Trek" and Professor Charles Xavier in the "X-Men" franchise, has died at 86, according to a statement shared on his Instagram account.

Stewart died Wednesday at his Los Angeles home, surrounded by family and friends and cared for by his wife, Sunny, following a battle with Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia, the statement said.

This is a developing story; check back later for updates.

Sam Roberts | Longreads | August 11, 2026 | 4,862 words (20 minutes)

Tuck Everlasting is a cautionary tale about a family of the same surname who, by inadvertently discovering the proverbial Fountain of Youth, is forced to reconcile with eternity. When I was assigned to write the obituary of the book’s author, Natalie Babbitt, I wondered whether she had continued pondering immortality herself. It turned out she had. Not surprisingly, her own take on eternal life echoed that of the fictional family patriarch, Angus Tuck. “I think that living forever would be a terrible thing,” I quoted her as saying in her Times obituary. “It would be boring, sad and lonely.” Babbitt died when she was 84. But Tuck and her other novels endure as Babbitt’s legacy for readers. So does my obituary, which in 2016 revealed her motivation to become an author: She was inspired to write Tuck, she said, when her four-year-old daughter woke from a nap crying because she was scared of dying. Babbitt had intended to become an illustrator, not an author, but pivoted after taking one writing course in college. She had enrolled because her husband hoped to become a novelist and she wanted to understand the challenges he faced.

Back at the Daily News, obituaries weren’t the best way to achieve immortality. We mostly ran one-paragraph squibs for members of the paper’s family, of printers, pressmen, and their immediate relatives. Instead, like most tabloids, the News thrived on the reported details of murders, assassinations, and suicides. Few news stories generated more of a sensation than death in all its dimensions. No less an authority once defined “news” than the ancient newspaper deliverer—a beloved man known as Bo Gee, who was decades too old to be described as a newsboy—weaving up Second Avenue with a wire shopping cart brimming with Chinese-language newspapers, calling out the headlines as he delivered the papers to Chinese bars and restaurants on Manhattan’s East Side. He began his route in Chinatown, where the papers were printed. Subscribers on Manhattan’s Upper East Side were often a day or two behind the headlines because the last stop on his evening route depended largely on the number of drinks he had finagled from bartenders along the way before he was too wobbly to walk any farther. When a colleague of mine, the columnist Jimmy Breslin (who described him as “a small, thirsty man”), asked him which headlines sold the most papers, he responded unhesitatingly. He didn’t need a public opinion poll or a focus group of readers or a real-time digital analysis of clickbait: Two were surefire circulation boosters. One was war! The other: big guy dies!

Taken separately, obits constitute an individual’s legacy. In aggregate, they can capture the social and cultural currency of an era. Which people are worth remembering? Which values are worth celebrating? How do we measure success and failure, good and evil, achievement and defeat, social rank and professional standing? How many of the one hundred thousand people now immortalized in the periodically printed historical compilation Who Was Who were deemed worthy of obituaries at the time of their death? How many of the more than 33,000 contemporary notables included in the latest editions of Who’s Who will get obituaries when they die? (That the titles of those reference books don’t include question marks suggests that the listings themselves are indisputable, a questionable supposition when the price of inclusion by some publishers seems to be for the “whos” to buy at least one copy of the book. An entry for Michael Fowler Cullis, a former British diplomat, describes his recreation as “writing obituaries for friends.”)

People want to be remembered, and we want to remember them, or, at least, we do. “Obituaries commemorate a life at the point where it is completed by death. Yet the completion is also depletion, in the sense that the life is constructed as meaningful precisely at the point where it stops,” Professor Clare Brant, who teaches literature and culture at Kings College London, has written. “They act as the first version of a biography—sometimes the only one, although Wikipedia has closed the gap with each life story seemingly waiting for a death sentence.” But as valuable as Wikipedia can be, the New York Public Library notes, “Obituaries provide an important tool to researchers by offering biographical information on individuals that may not be readily available elsewhere. In many cases, the obituary supplies the only biographical data extant on a person.” Philip Sutton, a genealogy librarian at the library, told Legacy.com, the self-proclaimed world’s largest commercial provider of online memorials and guest books, that obituaries may reveal the married name of a daughter identified years earlier in the census only by her maiden name; that by identifying an immigrant’s specific birthplace, obituaries can also invigorate research on a family’s roots.

Especially in small towns and midsize cities, local newspaper obituaries bond one generation to the next. By recalling where the deceased went to school and whom they married and who survived them, those obits provide the frames that form a moving picture of continuity, a narrative of cohesion. They describe whether, and how, the departed outpaced their parents in personal and professional achievement, their legacy to contemporary readers, and the promise of their progenitors—grandchildren or great-grandchildren who are still blank slates with the potential to add to the story.

To me, obituaries evoke the heartrending backstories of the characters in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, the unfulfilled promise of Joe Crowell, who got a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated first in his class: “Goin’ to be a great engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died in France. All that education for nothing.” Emily is dead, too, but so consumed by nostalgia—before being persuaded that “live people don’t understand, do they?”—that she descends from the town’s cemetery and wants to return to her past life in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, until the Stage Manager reminds her, “You not only live it but you watch yourself living it. And as you watch it, you see the thing that they, down there, never know. You see the future. You know what’s going to happen afterwards.” “When I think of an obituary, it’s as objective as journalism can be, a story on someone’s life,” Holly Shreve Gilbert, a journalism instructor at Oakland University who was the interim president of the Funeral Consumers Information Society, told Molly Birnbaum of Atlas Obscura. But “hyper-local journalism is dying, and so is the obituary of the local person.” Gilbert added, “Now, if it’s on Legacy.com or Facebook or a blog, we’re basically whitewashing everyone’s lives. We’re all happy. Everyone is happy.”

Well, not everyone.

Obituaries are a reminder that when you die, someone else gets the last word on your legacy—or, at least, the first of the last words. And for all the beloved and respected and cherished and valued that punctuate paid obituaries, don’t forget that families can try to perpetuate irreverent descriptions unilaterally to settle scores when one is no longer in a position to retaliate or respond. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Malcolm declaims of the repentant Thane of Cawdor, who was executed for treason, “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” If the Thane got the benefit of ambiguity, Florence Harrelson of Chelsea, Maine, had no such luck when she died in 2024 and her daughter, Christina Novak, placed a paid obituary in the Kennebec Journal. Wasting no words, the four-line obit read that the 65-year-old Henderson died “without family by her side due to burnt bridges and a wake of destruction left in her path.” It continued, “Florence did not want an obituary or anyone including family to know she died. That’s because even in death, she wanted those she terrorized to still be living in fear looking over their shoulders. So, this isn’t so much an obituary but more of a public service announcement.” 

In 2023, Gayle Harvey Heckman took the trouble to announce the death of her mother, Linda Lernal Stull, in her Michigan hometown newspaper, the Three Rivers Commercial-News, even though they hadn’t spoken in 24 years. “As a mother, Lernal was violent, hateful and cruel,” Heckman wrote. “She physically, mentally, emotionally, verbally and financially abused Gayle.” After going into excruciating detail, the obituary concluded, “Gayle and her family forgive Lernal and hope that she has found peace. They also hope to find peace within themselves. Lernal will not be missed by Gayle or her family. They all understand that the world is a much better place without her.” 

Blunt isn’t always bad. If writing can be a cathartic, it can also offer an object lesson. In 2015, a nine-hundred-word paid obituary in Maine’s Bangor Daily News (down-easters seem less inhibited about publicly evaluating their kin) began, “Coleen Sheran Singer (born Coleen Sheran Clark) would have turned 33 this August 31, but she died in Lewiston in an unsuspecting suburban professional couple’s home of a heroin overdose on the morning of December 25, 2014.” The obit was written by Singer’s former husband. It detailed her considerable assets—intellectually gifted, creative, and spirited—without concealing her hefty baggage as a woman who was addicted and suffering from borderline behavioral disorder. Brent Singer attributed the life his former wife led to her broken childhood home but blamed her death on Maine’s governor for denying her access to the methadone clinic she had relied on to stay straight.

In 2008, the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming reported that Jim Adams died at 53. Weary of soppy obituaries of patients who had courageously struggled against one disease or another until the bitter end, Adams went through his son to provide an unvarnished premortem verdict on his abbreviated life. And he had no compunctions about belatedly exercising personal responsibility and admitting that he lost his battle for less inspiring reasons entirely: “It was primarily as a result of being stubborn and not following doctor’s orders or maybe for just living life a little too hard for better than five decades.” He did lament, however, that he “was sadly deprived of his final wish, which was to be run over by a beer truck on the way to the liquor store to buy booze for a date.” 

In 2019, the family of Joe Heller (not that one) playfully celebrated his life in the Hartford Courant. They described him as “a frequent shopper at the Essex Dump” who “left his family with a house full of crap, 300 pounds of birdseed and dead houseplants.” Heller was so practiced a consummate napper that “there wasn’t an occasion too formal or an event too dour that Joe didn’t interrupt with his apnea and voluminous snoring.” The obituary added, “The family is seeking donations to offset the expense of publishing an exceedingly long obituary which would have really pissed Joe off.” (It then appealed generously for contributions to the Seabee Memorial Scholarship Association.)

The Hellers weren’t kidding. Those paid “obits” aren’t cheap. The New York Times doesn’t accept paid obituaries, but their paid death notices, depending on the edition and the day, cost about $1,000 for a bare-bones nine lines of type and $50 for each additional line, which verbose encomiums and fervent eulogizing can raise into the thousands of dollars. (In memoriam notices in newspapers that wish the departed “Happy Birthday in Heaven” remain a testament to the enduring value of print advertising.) While radio and television have generally fallen short in memorializing the dead, there are blogs, zines, and commercial websites devoted to dying, and personal web pages and online videos have all helped democratize death. So far, though, it’s one area in which even a buzzworthy website can’t always live up to its name (such as when Michael Jackson’s death was announced on MichaelJacksonLive.com).

The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina used to publish brief obituaries of local figures for free—until executives discovered that printing a full page of them daily was costing $350,000 annually for newsprint alone. When the paper imposed a fee, readers revolted; the editors relented in some editions. MyGoodbye.com was started by Stephen Miller (definitely not that one), who grew up next to a cemetery and, after escaping from his bank’s eightieth-floor office in 2 World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, decided to become an obituarist full-time. Legacy.com partners with hundreds of newspapers and thousands of funeral homes worldwide to account for about 70 percent of the deaths in the United States alone. A prototype called EPOCH—Electronically Preserving Obituaries as Cultural Heritage—created by the Orange County, Florida, Library System enabled people to publish an obit online for free. Another website, MyObits.com, also lets anyone publish a free memorial. Facebook even allows users to designate an executor to manage their profile after they’ve personally logged off this mortal coil for good.

Paid death notices have been wielded as much to ward off the living as to get the last word on the dead. In the early 1920s, Audrey Munson, America’s first supermodel, became so fed up with fame that she tried to fake her death by paying to run a phony death notice in her local upstate New York newspaper. Her gambit failed; she was so celebrated that the clerk she approached refused to accept the advertisement because he recognized her. Rudyard Kipling may have done her one better: When a newspaper reported his death prematurely, he wrote to the editor, “I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.” 

Six months before Oliver Sacks died of cancer at 82 in 2015, the London-born neurologist who lived in Manhattan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that amounted to an auto-obituary. Sacks was galvanized, he wrote, by the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, who, learning he was mortally ill at 65, penned a short autobiography in a single day in 1776. “I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective,” Sacks wrote. “There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at ‘NewsHour’ every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.” He explained that his shifting priorities were influenced less by passion than perspective: “This is not indifference but detachment—I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future.” 

Kelly McMasters, the author of The Leaving Season: A Memoir, started writing her obituary when she was 12; she has refreshed it almost annually since then. Her ritual was inspired by an assignment her mother was given while training as a volunteer at a local hospice. “I usually end up with a gentle accounting of the year, held against all the past ones,” McMasters wrote in a New York Times opinion essay. “I found many of the accomplishments that felt precious one year were hardly worth a mention the next.” Her private accounts produced an album of verbal snapshots, unreachable versions of herself that seemed as good as the dead about whom obituaries are otherwise published. “It seems dreadfully unfair that we wait until after our deaths to write them and never get to read them ourselves,” McMasters wrote. “Writing your obituary while you’re still alive can offer clarity about your life and, mercifully, if you find something lacking, you still have time to revise.” 

By inspiring the “Portraits of Grief” series of intimate minibiographies of the victims of 9/11 in the New York Times, the attack by fanatical al-Qaeda suicide bombers on the World Trade Center in 2001 may inadvertently have made the obituary more egalitarian than any event since the Civil War. These 200-word vignettes with thumbnail photographs weren’t standard obits or news stories. Volunteer reporters interviewed families and friends of the victims and the missing to sketch some 2,500 hundred profiles. Overseen by Jon Landman and Christine Kay on the Metro Desk, the portraits were published over nearly five months. “Terrorism rather than the internet democratized the obituary,” Professor Clare Brant wrote. Roy Harris wrote for the Poynter Institute of the project, “The portraits identified one aspect of life—a woman gardening, a man taking his daughter to ice-skating lessons, or perhaps indulging in a fondness for cigars.” The obituarist Nigel Starck said, “Each day’s pages would renew a sense of the tragedy’s scope, while the individual portraits made each person intimately real.” Our exercise in mining the unremarkable found a larger-than-life common denominator, one that challenges the novelist W. P. Kinsella’s conclusion that “the lives of ninety percent of the population are so dull that no one would care in the least about them, the lives of the remaining ten percent are so bizarre that no one would believe them.” 

Some of the deaths in those “Portraits of Grief” were preceded by chivalrous acts of courage and self-sacrifice. Those heroics worked their way into news articles. The portraits were not about how people died, not about their last moments of life, no matter how gutsy, but how they lived and what their loss meant to their family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. The gruesome, grisly details were superfluous, unlike an earlier obituary style in which the how sometimes seemed to predominate over the who, what, when, where, and why.

When Louisa May Alcott died in 1888, for example, the New York Times explained in the first paragraph of her obituary, “For a long time Miss Alcott had been ill, suffering from nervous prostration. Last Autumn she appeared to be improving and went to the Highlands to reside with Dr. Rhoda A. Lawrence. She drove from there into town to visit her father on Thursday last, and caught a cold, which on Saturday settled on the base of the brain and developed spinal meningitis.” The first five paragraphs of Teddy Roosevelt’s Times obituary in 1919 left nothing about the cause of death to the reader’s imagination: “His physicians said that the immediate cause of death was a clot of blood which detached itself from a vein and entered the lungs.” In 1892, reporting the death of Caroline Harrison, the wife of President Benjamin Harrison, the Atlanta Constitution described her corpse in clinical detail: “She shows in her emaciation the effects of the long wasting illness of eight months that has reduced her large, matronly figure to a thin, frail form.” Then again, as recently as 2000, the paper, now called the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ran an obituary by Kay Powell of a local church-choir tenor, who had also written a manuscript on the philosophy of religion, beginning this way: “David Robeson Morgan was a brilliant man whose future looked good, until he had a frontal lobotomy in 1947.”

“A writer may bear the same name as the subject of his memoir, but he is hardly the same person,” Robert W. Fuller, the former college president and self-styled dignitarian, surmised in the epilogue to his own memoir. “He has long since morphed into the subject’s successor, and then the successor of the successor.” Bridget Fowler, a sociology professor at the University of Glasgow and the author of The Obituary as Collective Memory, wrote, “The auto/biography as such is under the expressive control of its author and is thus as profound (or simplistic) as he or she is. In contrast, one characteristic of the obituary is that these lives are selected as particularly memorable, distinguished, or newsworthy.” She adds, “The obituary offers the rare accolade of public recognition, the first step toward posthumous memory. Yet it is not just a store of value, it is also a measure of value: the obituary as a biographical form illuminates the social reality of dominance and distinction, whilst only rarely shedding light on the world of subordination.” 

The onset of the AIDS epidemic presented editors with a sensitive dilemma: Merely having the virus implied vulnerable behavior—either drug use or homosexuality—that society was far from accepting. In 1986, the fashion designer Perry Ellis died of AIDS at age 46, as stated in his obituary in the Washington Post. In the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, his cause of his death was reported to be viral encephalitis. In early May 1987, Charles Ludlam, a playwright, parody actor, and admired figure in New York’s East Village underground arts scene, withdrew from the New York Shakespeare Festival’s scheduled Central Park production of Titus Andronicus. On May 28, Ludlam’s publicist announced that he had died of pneumonia. The New York Times‘s Jeremy Gerard assumed correctly that the pneumonia was a complication of AIDS, and believed the refusal to acknowledge the disease compounded the tragedy of Ludlam’s death by validating the stigma attached to gay people, who were among its most prominent victims.

As Leah Rosenzweig reported in Slate, for hours Gerard desperately tried to persuade Ludlam’s parents to confirm the actual cause but failed. “They were working-class Catholics from Long Island; as far as they were concerned, their son had died a shameful death,” Gerard recalled. But fifteen minutes before his deadline, the family’s lawyer called back. The Ludlams agreed to confirm the cause. On May 29, 1987, Gerard’s obituary of Charles Ludlam was the first that identified AIDS as the cause of death in the Times, on the front page.

“Obituaries contribute to national myths or collective memories of contemporary heroes by symbolically ‘reflecting what, in death, was most valued about the lives of individual citizens,'” Janice Hume wrote. “An obituary distills, publishes, and thus legitimizes something more abstract than mere facts. It also reveals values, highlighted in the attributes of the deceased, and should be examined not just as an indifferent chronicle but as a commemoration, a representation of an ideal, with its own distinct contribution to the understanding of history. Those ideals, part of obituary coverage, become safeguarded by their publication.” 

To quantify those values, Lux Narayan, a social media analyst, conducted a statistical survey of some 2,000 New York Times news obituaries that were published in 2015 and 2016. Not surprisingly, the fields of academics, science, politics, film, theater, music, dance, and art predominated among those deemed worthy. On average, they achieved the thing that made them worthy of a Times obituary when they were 37 years old—athletes more likely in their twenties, politicians in their forties. The prototypical obituary subject lived to be 81, which meant 44 years had elapsed between the accomplishment and, in the cases of the many obscure and quirky characters, their public aggrandizement. “Talk about having to be patient,” Narayan said. In a TED Talk, he explained his obsessive reading of the daily paper over scrambled eggs this way: “If you think about it, the front page of the newspaper is usually bad news and cues man’s failures. An instance where bad news cues accomplishment is at the end of the paper, in the obituaries.”

What were the most common denominators among those obituarized, and what do they suggest society—or, more to the point, the Times—valued? If your name was John, you didn’t necessarily have a better chance of being the subject of an obituary, but it was more likely that a man whose first name was John would appear in one. That’s not so surprising, given that John (along with James, Robert, Michael, and David) has been among the most popular names for American men born in the last 100 years. Narayan was struck by another commonality, though. The language-processing program revealed that the one word that leapt out everywhere was help, as a noun or verb. The most universal value, it seemed, that elevated the famous and not-so into those the Times editors considered worthy of obituaries was how much people helped. “They made a positive dent in the fabric of life,” Narayan said.

Journalists understand, or should, that statistical surveys of subjective material are fertile ground for as many question marks as answers. Patrick Nolan, a sociologist at the University of South Carolina, wondered whether the cult of celebrity has blossomed over the last century, as the anecdotal evidence suggests. Has the public become so starstruck that somebodies in less glamorous professions have been overshadowed? One way to measure the trajectory of society’s fascination quotient, he figured, was to enlist New York Times obituaries as a cultural barometer. Nolan’s canvas was every “notable death” that was published in the Times during the entire twentieth century.

“Most striking are the simultaneous increases in celebrity obituaries and declines in religious obituaries,” Nolan and Timothy J. Bertoni reported in the journal Sociation Today. “They document the increasing secularization and hedonism of American culture at a time when personal income was rising and public concern was shifting away from the basic issues of survival. The magnitude of these trends is seismic. While the Greeks may have looked to their gods for guidance and entertainment, we’ve turned increasingly to our celebrities—entertainers and athletes.” After dividing the century into quarters, Nolan and a doctoral student, Timothy Bertoni, randomly selected 20 days from 1900, 1925, 1950, 1975, and 2000 and ranked the professions of the dead by the number of obituaries run.

The number of obits of entertainers and athletes, grouped together, rose, from seventh most in 1900 to fifth in 1925, third in 1950, and first in 1975. By 2000, they remained in first place and accounted for 28 percent of obituaries. In 2000, the researchers didn’t find a single notable religious figure who was memorialized. The category had plummeted from fourth place when the 20th century began to last when the millennium ended. During the same period, the number of obituaries of notable individuals from the fields of business, finance, manufacturing, and industry declined by half. Americans, Janice Hume has written in her study of grief, “value each other and, indeed, value life for collective reasons. They value a long, robust, and full life, a life that is uniquely American, and a life that ensures social preservation. A typical Victorian obituary would carry the statement, ‘in life we are in the midst of death,’ but as this study suggests, at least on the obituary pages of historic mainstream American newspapers, in death we are in the midst of life.” Nigel Starck, too, argues that obituaries provide a glue that bonds society not in grief but in an aspirational reevaluation of our own lives.

“There is nothing inherently gloomy about the newspaper obituary page,” he writes. “Done well, it should capture life rather than wallow in death.” Clare Brant recalled her euphoric reaction to reading of the death of Martin Wells, the grandson of the English writer H. G. Wells, in the Guardian in 2009. He was an 80-year-old biologist with a passion for cephalopods and was also a novelist, painter, and yachtsman. “Though marine biologists don’t have dry lives in a literal sense, and people who love octopus usually have a sense of play, he was really lively,” Brant wrote. “I rejoiced that an academic could have such a full, happy and entertaining life—there’s hope for the rest of us! It wasn’t that I wanted to know him or even to have known him, but I was glad he’d existed, and I still want not to forget the implications of his existence.” 

And that was an obituary about a total stranger. For a family member, an obit represents an imprimatur, validation by association, a keepsake that maintains their heritage and, perhaps for a generation, prevents their own legacy from vanishing like a walnut in the batter of eternity. “The greatest investigative piece I ever wrote when I thought I was really important never survived more than a few weeks in terms of being kept around,” said Jim Nicholson, the Philadelphia journalist who regularly chronicled deaths of the common man, the nobodies, as he put it. “But these obituaries, they’re laminated. They’re put under glass. They’re hung on walls or in family Bibles. In fact, they’re even put into the inside coat pocket of the deceased. And, yeah, they’ll be around long after you and I are gone.” Nicholson’s obituaries were indelible. “My words give readers thousands of moments to remember of little lives lived well,” he said. “Perhaps I even gave them the secrets of how to live one well.”

What readers cherish about obituaries, Casey Cep wrote in the New Yorker, is “the opportunity to celebrate one’s own good fortune at still being alive, to keep tabs on death—who it comes for, at what age, and how much we have in common with the deceased—and also to trace an immensely compact narrative arc. So much of the news is ongoing and unsettled, but obituaries by definition have a kind of alluring finality.” In the two weeks after Victoria Chang’s mother died of pulmonary fibrosis in 2015, the Los Angeles–based poet feverishly wrote seventy poems. Her goal: to recast the newspaper obituary to identify what had been lost (“civility, language and the future,” she wrote) and death’s cultural impact on the living. She described writing an obituary as a wake-up call. “This person is dead,” Chang wrote. “You’re alive.”

Sam Roberts, a fifty-year veteran of New York journalism, is an obituaries reporter and formerly the Urban Affairs correspondent at the New York Times. He has hosted the New York Times Close Up on TV and the podcast Only in New York, anthologized in a book of the same name. He is the author of The New Yorkers, A History of New York in 27 Buildings, A History of New York in 101 Objects, Grand Central, and The Brother, among other books. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, New York magazine, Vanity Fair, Foreign Affairs, and Air Mail. Before joining the Times in 1983, he was the youngest city editor of the New York Daily News. He lives in New York with his wife.