The summer I turned nineteen, between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I landed a temporary job as what used to be called a cub reporter. The job was on my hometown newspaper.

The news people who hired me, I now believe, did so out of the goodness of their cynical hearts. They wanted to help a young person stupid enough to plan a journalism career. They, in their crusty way, wanted to pass along what they knew, give me a chance.

I did manage to advance, in my second summer, from writing obituaries to actually covering a minor religious convention and writing other human interest stories.

I also learned, after a public upbraiding by the editor, to check and recheck my reporting for any mistakes in spelling, wrong word usage, or other errors before I turned it in. (We had no computer programs then for checking such things.)

One lesson, however, was especially valuable for a young person, who thinks, like most young people, that they are going to live forever.

In the basement of the newspaper building was the “morgue.” Filed away in endless cabinets were the stories already written. They waited for unearthing when the inevitable happened—the death of a famous person

Thus, when a politician or a business magnate passed on, all the reporter had to do was write a few lead paragraphs dealing with the cause of death and immediate circumstances.

Every time the person did something great or degrading, the happening would be added to their file, but eventually the file ended.

Every person has an ending. Each of us writes chapters, perhaps for a long time, but the story always has an ending.

Try writing your own obituary. Anything you would like to change in your life before somebody else takes on the responsibility?