The obit for Yvonne Brill for the New York Times gathered a lot of bile on Twitter this weekend. The original obit (it was later revised) began like this:
She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.
But Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was also a brilliant rocket scientist, who in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to help keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.
I wasn't clear if Brill viewed herself as a Mom-First-Scientist-Second or this is how the journalist (a dude) interpreted her life. Lots of women of her generation want their mom accomplishments to come first, and maybe Brill was a product of her time. But maybe the journalist was just a jerk. Not sure.
I suppose that it's pretty cool that Brill was great enough in her home life AND her professional life that it's tricky to decide which accomplishment is most important. It's a GOOD problem to have.
What will the obit writers say about me? I think it will start with a lede, "she made a mean grilled cheese sandwich and then squandered too much time on the Internet."
Apt. 11d 
I had in mind: “His life was gentle, and the elements/So mixed in him that nature might stand up/ And say to all the world, “This was a man.”
However, the New York Times no longer runs obituaries for people of my station in life (upper middle class professionals).
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I imagine that obits bring comfort to family members, and that the family-related memories might be their top recollections? I thought it was lovely. But I’m no rocket scientist.
I do sometimes morbidly wonder how social media/blogs/fb/twitter accounts will work when we all start dying. Will the obit be the last blog post? Will a relative put it on the FB page? (Am I warped to wonder about these things?)
y81, that is beautiful. Are you a poet?
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“y81, that is beautiful. Are you a poet?”
Yep, he’s a regular Shakespeare.
I’m fascinated by the line of the obit where Brill was quoted as saying it’s harder to find a good husband than a good job. Still true?
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Whoops! Now I am embarrassed. I’ve read and seen Julius Ceaser. Many times. It’s my first morning back at work after spring break? Is that a good enough excuse?
Funny part is that I really liked the line….sigh.
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Kind of like the mom in Wrinkle in Time, right, who manages to be a stay-at-home mother as well as a high-profile scientist by running experiments in her barn. I always hated that mom, because she was fictional. Brill, on the other hand, sounds kind of interesting, but not without the details. I wish there were biographies, real ones, of women like her, who work out an individual solution of combining their individual life’s desires. I remember when I first started collecting the stories of grown children who spoke glowingly of their career-oriented moms (maybe 8 years ago?) as a counterpoint to the people who write more ambiguously or negatively (for example, Lynn Margulis’s daughter or Alice Walker’s daughter). There are moms (and children) who can do it — make their children feel cherished while still being committed elsewhere. The challenge is to figure out how (and to figure out if your children and you can develop that relationship). I like hearing evidence of those who succeed.
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“However, the New York Times no longer runs obituaries for people of my station in life (upper middle class professionals).”
Well, unless you did something actually world-changing, like Brill did.
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“Is that a good enough excuse?”
Works for me. 🙂
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bj, Times obituaries are not limited to world-changers. As best I can make out, the Times runs obituaries of people based on importance in the sense of newsworthiness, and the editors rely primarily on lexis/nexis searches. The result is multitudinous obituaries for journeyman baseball players and minor actresses, i.e., people who appeared regularly in the papers during their primes, but not for bank EVPs or law firm partners or wives of important men, since people in those groups generally aim not to appear in the newspapers at all. Fifty years ago, however, such people would have been covered.
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