Not to say that this has never happened before, but Sunday was the first time we’d ever seen if (tip o’ the pixel to The Missus).
Robert D. McFadden’s full-page sendoff of Lee Radziwill in Sunday’s New York Times started out in standard form.
Lee Radziwill, Former Princess and Sister of a First Lady, Is Dead at 85
Lee Radziwill, the free-spirited former princess who shared the qualities of wealth, social status and ambition with her older sister, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, but who struggled as an actor, decorator and writer to share her sister’s aura of success, died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.
Her daughter, Anna Christina Radziwill, confirmed the death, citing natural causes.
But then came something if not unnatural, at least unusual.
[T]abloids had long romantically linked Mrs. Radziwill and [Aristotle] Onassis, a notorious womanizer.
In a brief telephone interview for this obituary, Mrs. Radziwill scoffed at the notion that she had had an affair with Mr. Onassis, and insisted that she had “no regrets, none at all,” about her relationship with her sister, which was widely reported to have been strained after Mrs. Kennedy married Mr. Onassis.
Wait, what? The Times interviews people for their own obituaries?
Or should we say, co-bituaries?
That’s a new one on us. Regardless, we are definitely not sitting by the phone.
Campaign Outsider 
“Obit,” a documentary about the people who write these things for the Times, is surprisingly lively, as it were. Worth a look on Netflix.
Alden Whitman, the Times necrology overlord in the 1950s and ‘60s, wrote (source long forgotten here) of his style, including interviews with the yet to be deceased. He recalled one interview, and perhaps more, in which he caught himself asking about the subject ‘s life in the past tense.
That’s too funny . . .