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Ely Remembers 'Ordinary People' With Textured Obituaries

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The Remembrance Project will include every day stories about people we loved and lost. (keithreed01/Flickr)
The Remembrance Project will include every day stories about people we loved and lost. (keithreed01/Flickr)

Many people are avid readers of obituaries. And, usually, it's the passing of the well-known and famous that attract our attention. But some people are drawn to those small-print columns about about people who were equally loved but not as well-known.

Ordinary people who lived extraordinary, but less widely observed lives.

Writer Elissa Ely is drawn to their stories. She reads between the lines to find out who these mothers and fathers, colleagues and neighbors were.

She wants to tell the stories of people whose passings have gone more or less unnoticed.

So we're beginning a series we’re calling The Remembrance Project — the lives of those among us.

Guest

Elissa Ely, writer and Massachusetts state psychiatrist.

More

WBUR: The Remembrance Project: Rose King

  • "Rose King died May 27, 2011, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was 90 years old, and had lived in the same four-story house her entire life. She did not like to leave home. Generations of her family lived in the apartments below and above her, doing her grocery shopping and choosing to raise their own families in the presence of her gentle spirit and her cooking."

This segment aired on May 27, 2014.

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