Squeezing a life between the commas

Maybe you’re a little bit like me. Maybe, that is, when you heard Dan Fogelberg had died recently, you waited for somebody to come up with a description that felt right to you, that didn’t trivialize him, that didn’t condescend, that didn’t overpraise or underestimate. If you were touched by his music -- the lilting voice, the earnest delivery, the haunting sweetness -- you didn’t much care that it could be repetitious. You wanted somebody to come along and encapsulate his life and his art in a special way, a way that mirrored his uniqueness as a human being.

Instead, we got what we always get when a public figure passes away:

We got the dreaded commas.

A standard obituary requires an opening sentence that gives the person’s name, followed by a comma, a descriptive phrase, and then another comma. And so the Associated Press story about Fogelberg’s death started: “Dan Fogelberg, the singer and songwriter whose hits ‘Leader of the Band’ and ‘Same Old Lang Syne’ helped define the soft-rock era, died Sunday . . . . “

Name, comma, phrase, comma. Yet the phrase -- clamped as it is between those typographical pincers -- reduces the gloriously chaotic complication of a human life to a tidy clause. The magnificent flux of a fellow creature’s existence is squashed betwixt the twin commas. A vivid soul is caught like a Hummer between two narrow lampposts.

I can’t blame the AP scribe who wrote that opening. I’ve done the same thing myself. I’ve deployed the double-comma formula on many occasions. It is, after all, a quick and easy way to convey basic information.

Lists of the notable deceased in year-end news summaries, in which we are awash, typically follow the same path: name/comma/phrase/comma. “So-and-so,” these stories run, “known for such-and-such, died.” The twin commas try to fence in the distinctive achievement: songs sung, discoveries made, awards won.

Can’t we come up with more creative and original ways to mark the passing of people such as Fogelberg? Why not a few lines from a song? A photograph. A splash of color. A riddle. Words crushed between commas aren’t the only ways to suggest the essence of an inimitable soul. In Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town,” a character notices the headstone for a troubled choir director; there is no epitaph, just some musical notes. Why not?

And yet I sense the futility of my cause. I know what lies ahead:

“Julia Keller, who once complained about opening sentences in obituaries that employ a clause indicating the deceased person’s cultural significance, passed away yesterday from sheer exasperation.”

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Julia Keller is cultural critic at the Chicago Tribune.