I enjoy a well-crafted obituary as much as the next man, and now that people of my own generation are appearing there, the obituary page becomes closer and closer to my heart.

Yesterday I thought I might have to write an obituary for my older brother after he slipped while skating, cracked his head open and was rushed to intensive care, and so I was reviewing a few salient facts of his life — his long off-and-on romance with Natalie Wood, his invention of sunscreen, his real estate empire in the Caribbean — but now he is conscious and showing signs of intelligence so it looks as if I'm off the hook.

I like to read English obituaries, which are more frank than American obits. Americans go to great lengths not to speak ill of the dead and lean toward the comforting eulogy, but the obituary is not meant to comfort. It is meant to take inventory of a life. And thereby remind us that we too are mortal and someday the world will look at us with a cool clear eye and measure our contribution to the common good. ("His weekly column was always neatly typed and contained very few serious grammatical errors.") To make the dead guy into a demigod does not serve the common good.

I recently read the obituary of an English writer I'd never heard of named Edward Upward, who died last Friday at the age of 105.

Ed went to Cambridge and was a friend of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood and his career seems to have wilted in the heat of their brilliance. They became famous and he got a job teaching school. And then he joined the Communist Party, which is a heavy load of bricks to carry, and he married a hardline communist named Hilda, and he wrote an essay announcing that good writing could only be produced by Marxists, whereupon he suffered writer's block for 20 years. (Talk about poetic justice.)

"The middle decades were bleak for Upward," the obituary recounted. "During a sabbatical year designed to give Upward the chance to write, he suffered a nervous breakdown." Then when he did publish again, he had become an antique. His autobiographical trilogy, "The Spiral Ascent," was received by critics like you'd receive a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman.

And then there was the problem of walking around with the name Edward Upward.

I am a satirist. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Communist Party. I might have joined if Natalie Wood had tried to recruit me, but she did not. I am a Democrat but mainly for the atmosphere and so I can meet normal people who do real work.

And thanks to Edward Upward, I have decided not to take a sabbatical after all.

In the spirit of the corporate age, the This I Believe international media project now has returned as This I Believe Inc., whose Web site informs that it claims certain contractual rights to any submissions aired on public radio "so that your thoughtful words can inspire as many people as possible for generations to come."

What the country needs at this juncture, if I may suggest, is a radio program called "This I Don't Believe."

Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" airs 6 to 8 p.m. Saturday on radio station KHPR 88.1 and 6 to 8 p.m. Sunday on KIPO 89.3. His column appears Wednesday online at www.honoluluadvertiser.com/opinion and in Sunday's Focus section.

Reach Garrison Keillor at (Unknown address).