Jonna Carter: Fatal attraction

My brother who lives in lower Manhattan is on death watch. He is two years younger than I (although he looks 10 years older. Don't tell him I said that!), and he seems to have crossed some kind of age threshold in that he reads the obituaries.

I'm not talking about a community newspaper. He opens The New York Times and goes specifically to that rather extensive section. It's possible that I'm mistaken, but I don't think he's apartment shopping. Living and working in New York City affords one a staggering number of relationships with thousands of people over the course of a lifetime — people with big, important, busy, jet-setting lives. Frankly, this all seems quite exhausting. But given his career and his lifestyle, I suppose the odds are respectable that he would be seeing names of acquaintances — more accurately, past acquaintances — popping up with some degree of regularity.