The Life You Take May Be Your Own

Composing tributes to the recently departed has to be one of the most difficult, but satisfying exercises. It not only invites the obituary writer to learn considerably more about the deceased, but provokes him or her to re-evaluate aspects of their own life. Which is precisely what makes Sara Paretsky’s eulogy to the late police-procedural author Dorothy Uhnak, posted earlier this week at The Outfit, so noteworthy.

After explaining that Uhnak “died last month, by her own hand, at the age of seventy-six,” Paretsky recalls that another mystery writer, Carolyn Heilbrun (who composed 14 Kate Fansler novels under the nom de plume “Amanda Cross”), “also committed suicide” two years ago at age 77. Remarking on Heilbrun’s death, Paretsky concludes:

I know she was deeply concerned about the invisibility of older women, a topic she explored in Writing a Woman’s Life. She resigned her named chair at Columbia University because she was frustrated at the impossibility of her male colleagues attending to her views. But I still can’t make sense of her death.

I never met Dorothy Uhnak. I don’t know if she, too, felt invisible, unattended to, as she got older. I don’t know if she felt a dwindling of her powers, or if the market had left her behind.

I’ll be sixty next year. I struggle constantly with depression, with a sense of being out of step with the times, the market, with my own voice. When my literary godmothers give up the struggle, I’m terrified about what lies ahead.

With any luck, that fear will only make you stronger, Sara.