 Support of your job must in a sense be as a therapist, that you're handling grieving family members or non-family members, people who have agendas, maybe people jostling over the well or having that in mind. Some occasionally may even be happy but more often than not they're tragically bereaved and all of these individuals you talk with, you have to manage, you get them to cooperate so in a sense you're a psychologist of sorts. Well my oldest childhood friend actually has two degrees, one in journalism and one in counseling and she says the elicitation of information, that process is identical, where they diverge of course is what you do with the information once you have it. And indeed we need to be very careful, we're calling families at vulnerable times, they're grieving, they're exhausted, they're sleep deprived, they have a million things to do and we need to be very careful that we not however unwittingly present ourselves as their friend, their advocate, their grief counselors. Now that said it behooves us both journalistically so they feel comfortable enough to talk to us and be candid and in purely human terms to treat them as well as possible within allowable professional limits. Hearing all this what do you think you have learned about the psychology of death that say maybe I wouldn't know? I don't think there's anything I've learned that any of us wouldn't know. What I've learned is death sucks but I think I pretty much knew that before and I think you pretty much know that too. But worse than maybe you thought 15 years ago before you were doing this? Actually no, the reverse if anything. I'm very often asked oh you write obits, you're around death every day, isn't that depressing and I must admit when I started the job full time in 2004 I worried about that a little bit going in and to my great joy and great relief I found out right away it's almost never depressing for all these reasons we've discussed in an obit of perhaps a thousand words where you're writing about someone fascinating who did something really interesting often really wonderful maybe a sentence or two will be about the death and the other 98% of the story is about the life so in a strange way with rare exceptions writing obits is a kind of very life affirming thing to do and also wonderful because my colleagues and I are paid to tell stories and it doesn't get much better than that. So it's often said for instance that the greatest works in the theatre are tragedies one at King Leary, two examples of many and maybe we're attracted to tragedy because in a sense it's life affirming or it's somehow cathartic and writing about the deaths of individuals you feel it gives you a better or maybe healthier perspective on life in the same way that going to see a tragic work in the theatre might. But again think of what was just said it's not tragedy that's my point writing about it's not the case that writing about obits is life-affirming because it's tragedy writing about obits is life-affirming because it's not tragedy