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I read almost anything, from toothpaste packaging to museum displays. But one category holds a special fascination for me: obituaries.

It is not death that draws me in. It is the chance to discover people I never had the opportunity to meet and learn the stories they left behind.

Margaret M. DeAdder sounded unforgettable. Her obituary portrayed her as an expert coupon clipper and cookie baker, a fearsome driver, a defender of underdogs and a ruthless card player with an audacious sense of humor.

Then there was George Mensonsa, who died at 95 in 2019. He was believed to be the sailor shown kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day, an image that inspired posters and the statue “Unconditional Surrender.” Mensonsa said he had a special appreciation for nurses after witnessing their care for wounded veterans. His wife joked that he had never kissed her with the same intensity.

Margo Rogers Kurtz’s tribute offered another extraordinary story. As a young woman, she flew solo in a small open-cockpit plane and became the first woman to christen a combat aircraft. Her pilot husband and his crew had assembled the plane from parts of other damaged aircraft, naming it the Swoose — a combination of swan and goose.

The couple later named their actress daughter, Swoosie, after the aircraft. Swoosie remembered her mother as the ideal 1940s wartime bride, pairing resilience and capability with beauty and bright red lipstick.

Tony Mendez’s obituary recalled an operation later dramatized in “Argo,” with Ben Affleck portraying him. A CIA officer who became the agency’s chief of disguise, Mendez devised a plan to extract six Americans from Iran. The group had taken refuge at the Canadian Embassy and escaped by posing as Canadian filmmakers connected to a fictional movie production called “Argo.”

My favorite obituary appeared in The Washington Post on May 4, 2018, and told the story of Nanalee Allen Craig. She was the woman featured in “American Girl in Italy,” part of a 1952 Cosmopolitan photo essay about women traveling alone, something far less common at the time.

The famous photograph shows the six-foot-tall Craig walking past a crowd of Italian men who were staring and calling out to her. It later became an international feminist symbol. In an unexpected turn, she married an Italian count who was a cousin of one of the men pictured. Craig later joked that the image brought her countless complimentary meals at Italian restaurants.

I was never fortunate enough to know any of these people. Through their obituaries, however, I could at least meet them secondhand.