I was
looking through the obituary section of the local newspaper the other day
(something I do with increasing regularity, checking to see how many of the
players are younger than I am) when I realized something jarring.
Out of the
seven or eight people in that day’s report, nobody died.
Most of
them “passed away” or “passed on,” euphemisms from which my first managing
editor quickly weaned me. One of the departed, if memory serves, came to rest
in the arms of God, Jesus, or both, to which the same managing editor would
have asked, “Who’s your source and how do they know?” There is no good answer
to that question.
But that
experience with the local obituaries got me to thinking about my years as an
obituary writer for the paper (a job I actually perversely enjoyed) and the way
in which the rendering of obituaries has changed over the years. Not for the
better, I might add.
When the Family Calls the Shots
The biggest
change in the past couple of decades has been the shift from obituaries being
news stories, with all that entails, to being paid notices written and inserted
in the paper by families and friends. That, in itself, tends to greatly reduce
the amount of interesting information in any given story, such as that the
deceased was shot to death by a jealous husband.
It’s all
part of a general trend toward outsourcing, which is something small-town
newspapers have been doing too much of lately. Instead of having a paid
reporter write a factual obituary, the paper now charges families by the
column-inch for putting in their own stories, thereby converting an ongoing
expense into a revenue stream. In today’s business climate, I suppose few
newspapers (or many other businesses, for that matter) can ignore that sort of
financial imperative.
One problem
(out of many) with this approach is that after a while, the handful of
remaining reporters and editors at the newspaper stop thinking of deaths in the
community as news, unless there’s a police report involved. In the past year
there have been several instances of people dying who were active in the
community and in the news back in their prime. Yet their deaths merited no news
story, just the paid obituary. I shake my head.
Stick to the Known Facts
In my
obituary-writing days there were other rules we had to follow. If the deceased
was relatively young (under 60 back in the 1970s), we were supposed to try to
ascertain a cause of death, especially if the demise was sudden. That’s
something you don’t see too often any more, unless the family wants to make a
point of the departed’s “heroic” battle with cancer or some other disease
that’s respectable enough to print.
We also
weren’t allowed to editorialize. The first time I wrote in an obituary that
someone was a “loving” husband and father, the managing editor deleted “loving”
with a vicious stroke of his pencil. (This was before computers.) “How do we
know he was loving?” he asked. “For all we know, he was a miserable bastard who
beat his kids and drove his wife to drink.”
The old
obituary style was about strict accuracy and a forsaking of wishful
sentimentality. When my time comes (not for a while, I hope), the obituary, if
I have any vote in the matter, will say that I died, not passed away. I’m also
hoping it says I was 90 years old, was shot to death by a jealous husband, and
that a 27-year-old suspect is in custody.
