What Would You Want Your One-Sentence NY Times Obit To Say?

The United States has lost nearly 100,000 people to COVID-19, in what seems an extraordinarily compressed amount of time.

Even though the numbers seem hard to grasp, these people all led lives, too. Or, as the New York Times put it on Sunday, “They were not simply names on a list. They were us.”

The Times picked out 1,000 of those people to honor with micro-obits, printed on its front page and on two pages inside.

Each person was commemorated with their name, age, city, and a sentence about them.

There were well-known musicians, like Bucky Pizzarelli, the jazz guitarist, and Ellis Marsalis, the patriarch of the New Orleans musical family.

There were members of the Times family, and people known only to their friends and family.

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Scanning the vast rows of type on the front page, the individual stories popped up like spring flowers.

“Margaret Loughlin, 91, Massachusetts, had a mystic’s direct sense of wonder and oneness.”

“Charles Constantino, 66, Menlo Park, N.J., worked 40 years for the New York Times.”