02 Oct Life lived: a dishwasher’s obituary

On the evening of September 12, a hit-and-run driver struck Neil Alan Smith on Fourth Street North, St. Petersburg, FL, throwing him off his mountain bike. Smith, 48, a dishwasher at the Crab Shack restaurant in St. Petersburg, died six days later at Bayfront Medical Center.

When the Times announced Smith’s death on its website, a reader commented:

A man who is working as a dishwasher at the Crab Shack at the age of 48 is surely better off dead.

Times editors swiftly removed the post, deeming it offensive and insensitive to the dead man’s friends and family. Then they took another, more unusual, step. They assigned reporter Andrew Meacham to look into Smith’s life and prepare a fuller obituary, in support of the simple proposition that every life matters.

The results are moving:

This much is certain about Mr. Smith: A number of people miss him.

He had a small but loyal network of co-workers and friends who are planning soon to celebrate his life.

They all describe Mr. Smith as steady and dependable. He rode his bicycle nearly four miles each way from the Hollywood Trailer Park on Fourth Street N to the Crab Shack on Gandy Boulevard, where he had worked for the past 10 years. In a business known for turnover, that is considered a long time.

“I’ll probably go through another 10 people to find somebody like him,” said Tyrone Dayhoff, 53, the Crab Shack’s manager.

Read the whole story here.

Meacham’s evocative report highlights one other thing: the terrible mistake newspapers made two decades ago, when the lure of easy money caused them to abandon obituary reporting in favor of paid death notices.

(Via James Fallows, one of whose readers contrasted Smith’s story with the Chicago Law professor who recently caused a stir when he complained of having the difficulty making ends meet on a salary well above $250,000 per year.)