6 life lessons: from the dead
6. Act now
Writing about the lives of 800 people who have died turns you into the reporter equivalent of that sage guru in cartoons who sits alone on a mountaintop. The job, people think, must inspire life-changing deep insights, and in a way it has -- though I am no better at answering life's deep unanswerable questions. But because I think about death a lot, I realized last year that if I live exactly as long as my father, I have 25 years left. That epiphany, along with other factors, led me to move from Greater Boston to a small town in Vermont. It's a long commute to the Globe, but I love where I live. Take it from an obituary writer: Don't put off what you've always wanted to do.