In June, the writer Lore Segal, who had started hospice at her home in Manhattan, sent an email to her friends. “I am not sad or angry or afraid,” she wrote, according to a lovely profile in the New York Times Magazine. “Why aren’t I? It seems that having had a good 96 years will do very well.”

Starting in June 2023, I edited a weekly obituary newsletter for JTA. Segal, who died on Oct. 7, provided a fitting epigraph for the newsletter, which we called “Jewish Life Stories.” In brief obituaries we tried to capture the good years of the recently deceased, and the ways they made the communities they lived in better or more interesting places.

JTA is putting the newsletter on hold as I take on other assignments. My colleagues and I will continue to write obituaries, but it’s a good occasion to reflect on what I learned from and was able to contribute by remembering hundreds of remarkable people.

The job is easier, of course, when the deceased live long lives, and die with what Ecclesiastes calls a “good name.” We said goodbye to many Holocaust survivors, most memorably to those — a cardiothoracic surgeon, a pioneer of laparoscopic surgery, a tailor to presidents and movie stars — who dedicated themselves to endeavors that affirmed life in the face of illness or tragedy. We remembered influential scholars, like the feminist studies pioneer Frieda Johles Forman and Shoah historian

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