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When former president Jimmy Carter died, on Sunday at 100 years old, news organizations around the world quickly published substantial obituaries detailing his life and career, some of which were written decades ago by reporters who have long since moved on.
Larry Eichel, for example, wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer's first draft of Carter's obit nearly 35 years ago, when he was a reporter at the paper, part of a long-standing practice in journalism to string together biographical information, personal details and career milestones for notable figures in advance so as to be prepared when they die. Eichel's daughter, Molly Eichel, who is now deputy managing editor at the Inquirer, wrote on social media on Sunday that her father left the paper in 2008, making Carter's obit, which ran in print Monday, his first A1 story in 16 years.
"Ex-presidents are always at the top of the advance obituary list," the elder Eichel told The Washington Post in a phone interview. "These are important people, major historical figures. You want to give them the appropriate treatment, and you can't do that on deadline."
Eichel, who is now 75 and works as a senior adviser at the Philadelphia-focused urban research group at the Pew Charitable Trust that he started after leaving the Inquirer, recalled getting tapped to write the obit in 1990.
"I was kind of between assignments, and they were trying to figure out something useful for me to do. I had been covering politics, and at that time there were four living ex-presidents: Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Carter. And an editor said, ‘Why don't you do advance obits on all of them?' Obviously the other three were used relatively quickly."
Carter's considerable longevity meant that some of his obit writers have by now not only left journalism but also their mortal coils.
Former New York Times national reporter Roy Reed, who shares a byline on the newspaper's Carter obituary, died in 2017. The Post's Edward Walsh, who worked as the paper's White House correspondent during the Carter administration and has a byline on The Post's Carter obit, died in 2014. And the Guardian's Carter obituary was written by Harold Jackson, one of the paper's Washington correspondents during the Carter years, who died in 2021.
At The Post, legendary obituary editor J.Y. Smith - who was recognized for overhauling the paper's process for writing advance obituaries and who was the subject of his own colorful obituary after his death in 2006 - co-bylined roughly a dozen Post obits posthumously.
The practice of writing and publishing obituaries, even well after death, can be fraught: Who merits a newspaper obituary? Who decides who gets one? How to best take the measure of a person's life - their successes, shortcomings, good deeds and moral failings - in a single story?
Attempting to fully capture a person's life and imbue it with the appropriate weight and meaning before they are actually dead, then, can take on a slightly morbid quality. But the fact that an obit's subject can outlive its writer is simply an oddity of the process.
"Some readers clearly find the misalignment of the deaths jarring, but since we cannot be permanently updating everything all the time, there are always going to be some cases where we'll stick with what we've got," Guardian obituary editor Robert White told The Post in an email.
White said his team starts thinking about obits for notable figures as soon as they turn 70, and he said the paper has some 2,000 obituaries on file.
"The website is just as keen as print to have good obits go up very quickly," White said. "They need to add value to the news accounts, and of course these days every single detail can be challenged through Googling."
Carter's very long postpresidential public life meant obituary writers had a lot of material to work with. And because Carter entered hospice more than a year ago, news organizations were, as Eichel said, "put on alert."
Eichel added that he liked the process of writing advance obits, as it gave him "a chance to go back to recent history and read a lot of clips and books, especially books that the subjects had written. … I remember enjoying the work," he said.
And will his byline appear on any future obituaries in the Philadelphia Inquirer?
"No," Eichel said, with a laugh. "Pretty sure this is the last one."