I’ve written a question-and-answer column for much of the last decade. But when Alfread G. Mouton, my one-time academic adviser — and zydeco dancing instructor — at McNeese used to say to people, “You don’t want to end up in his column,” he wasn’t talking about The Informer.

I was hired at the American Press in 1997 as a part-time proofreader, a job that, given its name, mostly involved checking stories and news pages for errors. But it also included several other tasks, among them inputting obituaries.

That’s what Mouton was talking about — and he talked about it every single time I saw him in the years before his death in July 2004. I was still inputting some obituaries at the time. But I had no hand in them when his notice appeared, so — and he’d make this point if he were around — he never did end up in my column.

But many of your friends and relatives did.

REMINDED

Eric Cormier, American Press food columnist and a friend of mine, recently urged me to write something about my tenure doing obits. I don’t remember how the topic was raised.

But I do know that a few days earlier we’d discussed the much-remarked-on story of an elderly Iowa couple who died while holding hands.

And that reminded me of my father’s parents, John and Catherine Perzo, who died within months of each other in the late 1990s; and then of my uncle Ron Perzo, who died in 2009; and my mother’s mother, a matriarch really, Blanche Reyna, who died in 2001; and my mother’s aunt and my grandmother’s sister Pat, who died Oct. 29; and my neighbor, also named Pat, who died in September 2010.

I could go on, and so could you. But our space is limited.

REMEMBERING

Long before Cormier suggested the idea, I’d thought about writing something about my days doing obituaries. But, I confess, nothing profound — nothing worth your time — ever occurred to me.

Death is, after all, prosaic. It happens all the time, and it will sooner or later happen to us all. It’s certain, but that certainty doesn’t so much haunt life, as invigorate it.

The presence of death — and here I borrow from Cormier — flavors life, spices it up. It can leave a bittersweet taste, for sure. But, still, sweetness remains — the aftertaste of our time with the departed.

Mouton’s ribbing; the hours I spent at my Grandpa and Grandma Perzo’s house; the kindness of my uncle; my Grandma Reyna’s laugh; my Aunt Pat’s good humor; and the stoicism of my neighbor, whose cancer took much of the bone structure from his face but failed to hinder his smile — all of that enriches my life in the remembering.

As I said before, none of this is profound or new or exclusive to me. So why write it?

I guess maybe, in the end, I just wanted to finally include in my column the people I remember fondly.