Park Slope Author Named Food Co-Op's In-House Obituarist

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — “One of these days your Coop shift may roll around and you will not sign in. Not because you’re on vacation, laid up with the flu or, miracle of miracles, finally retired, but because you have died.”

So begins a morbid piece in last week’s issue of the Linewaiter’s Gazette, the official newsletter of the Park Slope Food Coop, on a very real, recurring problem in which one of the co-op’s hundreds of members passes away, but their colleagues don’t find out for weeks.

On hand to address that problem is prolific Park Slope author, 24-year co-op veteran and ”longtime denizen of the dairy cooler” Tom Rayfiel.

“We talk a lot about being a community but when one of us dies there’s no formal acknowledgement,” Rayfiel told the Gazette. “At best, a slip of paper is taped to the entrance door bearing some cryptic announcement.”

In his new position as volunteer co-op obituarist, Rayfiel will reportedly be overhauling the form that “squad” leaders fill out when their team members die.

Dead members’ spouses or next of kin will now have the option to request an official co-op obituary.

“Ideally, I’d get an anecdote or two,” Rayfiel told the Gazette. “Essentially, it will just be two short paragraphs, one about the member’s ‘work life’ and one about the member’s ‘Coop life.’ Plus information about survivors.”

And indeed, on the last page of the Feb. 4 issue of the the Gazette, at the very bottom of the page, is Rayfiel’s first obit — for Fort Greene theater director and teacher Tim Vasen.

”Among his jobs,” Rayfiel writes of Vasen, ”was restocking the bulk items.”

Read the full story in the Linewaiters’ Gazette [PDF].