Well-written obits of lives lived well
The New York Times’ obituary of John Fairfax is making the rounds this weekend. There’s nothing like reading tight copy about an interesting person you’ve never heard of. It seemed like a good occasion to share a few of my favorite obits from the past few years.
Fairfax is best known for rowing across the Atlantic Ocean alone, and for rowing across the Pacific with his girlfriend. The latter seems the far greater accomplishment, and not just because crossing the Pacific took a year to the Atlantic’s six months. (“The couple survived the voyage, and so, for quite some time, did their romance,” the Times reports.)
What’s catching people’s attention in Mr. Fairfax’s obit are the tidbits about his early adventures: “At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate.” Suicide-by-jaguar? Sounds like The Most Interesting Man in the World.
There was another great obit last year, when we learned of the death of Nancy Wake, a “proud spy and Nazi foe.” The Times:
By her own account she once killed a German sentry with her bare hands, and ordered the execution of a woman she believed to be a German spy.
But my favorite is an obituary from 2010, on the death of Knut Haugland. He was a sailor on the Kon-Tiki expedition across the Pacific Ocean by raft, but it was his exploits during World War II that caught my eye:
As a radio engineer, Mr. Haugland had fought the invading Nazis at the battle of Narvik in 1940 and then, while pretending to be a typical worker at an Oslo radio factory, took a leading role in the anti-Nazi resistance, training radio operators and setting up secret transmitters.
Twice he was captured and escaped, once by back-flipping over a snow bank and running off into the woods before his guards could use their weapons. A third time, surrounded by the Gestapo at a maternity hospital in Oslo where he had set up a transmitter in a chimney, he shot his way to freedom with a pistol.
