When Indiana Congresswoman Jackie Walorski died in a traffic accident last month, readers of the Washington Post write-up had to wait until the final paragraph — below the fulsome tributes from a bipartisan array of colleagues; below the discussions of her anti-abortion politics and her committee assignments — to learn about what may have been the most important vote of her career: On January 6th, 2021, she voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election.

That was more than the paper’s readers got in the stories about the passing of fellow GOP Representatives Jim Hagedorn and Ron Wright, who have also died in the 20 months since the Capitol insurrection. Their votes to overturn an American presidential election went unmentioned in the reports about their deaths.

Obituaries and news coverage of deaths are an imperfect form, especially when they have to double as breaking stories of a public figure’s unexpected demise. All the same, they are as close as we get to a rough draft of biography, an approximation of what contemporaries think are the key parts of the dearly departed’s permanent record. And so far, they reveal a Washington culture deeply uncertain about election denial and its legacy.

Rep. Jim Hagedorn addresses a crowd at a campaign rally for President Donald Trump in 2020.

Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo

Was the vote against certifying the 2020 election the most important part of the CVs of the three late members of Congress? Of course not. They had families and communities and political ambitions realized and unrealized. But every now and then, history offers up a binary along with all of those shades of gray. You either voted to accept the election or you didn’t. It’s not just another vote. If someone new in town were to happen upon many of the obits, though, they’d likely not realize that something traumatic and unprecedented had happened less than two years ago.

The whole spectacle, incidentally, is also an argument for dedicated obituary desks. Writing about a dead person on a living beat can be just as interpersonally tricky as writing about a live person on that same beat. In theory, someone who doesn’t have to deal again with the dramatis personae of a politician’s story might feel a bit more free to write for the history books.

“There’s no beat sweeteners for an obituary writer,” Miller says.