I used to be an obituary writer. →[More:]It wasn't my only responsibility; in the newsroom where I worked there were too few staffers and too many stories for me to focus entirely upon the six to eight people whose deaths were reported each day.

But, oddly, obituary writing was my most rewarding and most important work. I could cover a fatal car accident and feel less strongly about it than I would about the obit of a young girl who died from leukemia.

We mostly wrote boilerplate: Name, age, date of death, cause of death. We were strict about listing survivors -- immediate family only, no cousins or pets. But sometimes, as in the case of the girl with leukemia, I was able to slip something in there that was important to the family. "She enjoyed soccer, ballet, and spending time with her dog, Dog." It seems empty and meaningless in this context, but to the people I dealt with each day, it was more important than you'd expect.

What I discovered was this: When you're writing obits, every person matters. Every life was worthwhile in some way, and every family deserves the chance to remember their loved ones out loud.

It's cathartic, in a way, to be able to take an hour off from planning funeral arrangements and lodging for extended family, to just talk about this person who is now gone. In my best interviews, I was able to strike up a rapport with the family members, getting them to remember specific details, funny moments, and personality quirks. But even in the worst of my obits, I was able to spell out a specific list of accomplishments. I was writing people's life stories, though admittedly in 500 words or less.

The obits were the most widely read section of the paper, before I came and until we discontinued our free obituary service during my tenure.

There's been a lot of discussion on certain websites lately about the value of posting obituaries, and I resist joining in because what can I say? Yes, it's true, another person died. And you may not have known that person, and you may not care, and CNN most definitely did not do the person justice. Betwixt Wikipedia, CNN, and a few other websites, you may be able to pay homage to a person, or to capture his or her best accomplishments in a paragraph. But most folks aren't so meticulous, and it makes me sad.

When someone even moderately well-known dies, people are tempted to sum up their lives with a single link. As an obit writer, I had to fight that temptation -- no matter how many death reports we got each day, I had to do my best to take time for every individual. To be sympathetic, and delicate, and most importantly accurate and thorough.

And you know, sometimes there were people no one had ever heard of, people who weren't considered "important" because they weren't senior VPs or garden club presidents or heiresses or inventors. But what I loved was that even these people, the ones nobody knew or cared about, might pique someone's interest after they were gone. It was their one -- and final -- moment to shine.

A good book about the whole sujbect: Marilyn Johnson's The Death Beat.