I have been trying for several days to write an encyclopedia entry about Theresa Duncan, who I did not know and whose legacy is so snarled up with her tragic, spectacular death. I say trying because the entry is capped at 500 words and after avoiding it (too sad) and worrying over it, I have still managed to generate only 300 words.

Death comes for us all, I know, and grief is more inevitable than taxes, but I cannot stop thinking about the heavy responsibility of writing reference materials. In this, encyclopedia entries are such an inversion–the entries are short and straightforward, and they count pretty low in the “counts for tenure” metrics that most academics are beholden to. And yet an encyclopedia entry is a thing likely to be seen and referenced for years. This particular encyclopedia is entering a second edition.

I am writing an entry, rather than revising an entry, about Theresa Duncan because the editors realized the first edition had too few women and so Jennifer deWinter and I are together plugging away at this list. And, they’re just encyclopedia entries, and they’re just 500 words, but there’s Theresa Duncan. Tragic. Absent. Overshadowed by her death. There are other thorny issues that come up (how to respectfully handle name changes, for example), but most of those have only the weight of my own desire to be tactful and kind.

But, here stewed in procrastination is the inevitability of death, the difficulty of preservation, the profound fickleness of media industries, and this sad reminder of how fragile everything is — media formats and historical records, memories, careers, and we ourselves. There is a weight to all of this and some of that weight is responsibility. I am a historian. We are all mortal. I do not wish to cause anyone pain. References and recordings are likely to be much of what I leave behind. My books will go out of print, get culled from libraries, but the interviews I’ve completed will still be in the archives where maybe 100 years from now someone will revisit and find my informalities quaint, my voice strange (it’s strange to me, too).