The Globe and Mail's Elizabeth Renzetti at an obituary writers' convention in Bath, England.

An excerpt:

For a group of people who make a living writing about the dead, they really are a feisty lot. The folks who write obituaries believe that there are more things in heaven and under the earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, and those things are worth a spirited debate.

Take the issue of the great man vs. Joe Blow, for example. You may not know it, but this is a subject of philosophical import to the obituary world, and one that encompasses class structure, the changing nature of newspapers, and the different priorities of the old world and the new.

Here's how it unfolds at the 7th Great Obituary Writers' Conference, held this year in an airless conference room in a Bath hotel. Kay Powell, a veteran journalist with a molasses-rich accent and a Southern woman's flair for self-adornment, is entertaining the room with tales of the deceased who grace the pages of her newspaper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

One old fellow's obit was accompanied by his recipe for pound cake. On another day, a Sunday ("when everyone in the South is at church or their mama's house for lunch"), Powell struggled to bring to life a dead baggage handler. She phoned friends and family, but found no vital anecdote until she reached one of his colleagues, who told her that the man had been the subject of a Discovery channel documentary, and was so dedicated that he'd lost fingers in the quest for safe-luggage transport. There was her obit.