After a decade as an investigative reporter, Jim Nicholson reluctantly took on the dead beat, becoming the first obituary writer at the Philadelphia Daily News in 1982. More than twenty-five years later he could still remember how the “faces of my long time colleagues betrayed expressions people can’t hide when looking at a terminal patient with that ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ look in their eyes.”
Nicholson carved out his own niche according to a formula worked out with Tom Livingston, the paper’s managing editor. “The newsroom handles the big guys, Nicholson writes about the nobodies,” Nicholson recalled in “The Making of an Obituary Writer — and a Man,” an article for the fall 2006 edition of Nieman Reports. “I started writing obits like they were personal columns, with a lot of subjective slants on philosophy, religion, cabbages, and kings, all meant to enhance the life, times, and character of the deceased.” By the time Nicholson retired in 2001, he considered obits not only “the best job” he had ever had in journalism but also one that had vanquished his journalistic cynicism and made him believe that “most men and women are good; most when given a chance will do right; most will show honor.”
I’m not sure I’m ready to go that far, but here’s one thing I do know: writing obituaries teaches you that there is no such thing as an uninteresting or insignificant life. Far from a dead end, it is an invitation to expand your horizons and your empathy. One of the ways that I have stretched mine has been finding new ways to tell the story of a life. You can’t recycle an obituary by topping it with a new lede (journalists’ term for the article’s opening paragraph) as you can with a developing news story, but you can repackage your research to produce different treatments in other parts of the paper and on the Web.
Space on the Web is infinite, so you can write at length and add timelines and list film and book titles in sidebars — context and details that are usually trimmed to make an obituary fit the increasingly truncated space of the shrinking newspaper page. For example, late in 2008 I wrote an advance obituary of Jean Pelletier, former mayor of Quebec City and chief of staff to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. I did a massive amount of research on the sponsorship scandal, the 1995 Quebec referendum, and other aspects of Pelletier’s life and career, as well as several audio interviews that included a conversation with former prime minister Chrétien. I couldn’t possibly cram all that material into the finite space of an obituary page, so when Pelletier died on January 10, 2009, I let the obituary run long, complete with sidebars, on the Web. Then an enterprising Globe videographer and I put together a web package using slides, audio from my interviews, music, and a voice-over that I wrote and recorded to tie it all together as an enhancement of the printed obituary. In the process I used material that otherwise would have hit the floor, learned other skills, and got an additional and different byline.
Sometimes a life is too complicated for a single page; sometimes words alone can’t suffice. I was on holiday when jazz pianist Oscar Peterson died two days before Christmas in 2007, so I wasn’t involved in writing his obituary (that’s one of the reasons I am glad to include him in this book). Instead I read about Peterson growing up in the Depression in Montreal, his determination to play music, and the tributes attesting to his musical genius, just like any other newspaper subscriber. How much better it would be, I thought at the time, along with the biography and the accolades, to provide a video link to give readers a chance to hear and see him performing. On radio and television I saw and heard lots of clips of Peterson playing the piano, but those media skimped on the biographical details that imbued his life and his music with colour and resonance. The authority of print plus the vibrancy of the Web can create a synergy that produces an obituary that lives far beyond the typical news cycle.
Myth Number Two: Obituaries Are Depressing
OBITUARIES ARE ABOUT life, not death. In the same way that a birthday or an anniversary provides the opportunity to reflect on a milestone, death is the occasion for setting an entire life in context. The sad and even tragic fact of somebody’s death is a news flash; the laments of mourners are reaction pieces; public utterances at funerals for the deceased are eulogies. But the obituary is something else. It is an account of a life in all its complexity — the light as well as the shadow, the achievements as well as the failings — set within the context of the times in which the person lived.
That makes an obituary a combination of biography, history, analysis, and reportage. I rarely write about accident or murder victims or young soldiers killed in war zones — people whose lives were snuffed out by bad luck or tragic circumstance before they had a chance to realize their potential. Usually my subjects are people who were once famous, at least in this country, until the klieg lights of public attention dimmed. Their names are familiar to older readers but unknown to a younger generation. The goal is to chronicle their successes along with the controversies that dogged them and the challenges they overcame. What I have learned is that every life is fascinating in its own way, if only I can dig deep enough into the past and learn the personal and public details of my subject’s life and career — usually in time for the next day’s paper.
Research makes the difference between capturing a life in all its complexity and slipshod accounts. When people ask me for advice about how to write obituaries, I always say, “Before you pick up the phone, go to the library.” Sometimes, research puts paid to an intriguing story, but so be it.
Legendary sportswriter Trent Frayne was revered in newsrooms across the country for his stylish writing, incisive commentary, and generosity to cub reporters, but he was also a serious drinker. He was arrested for driving under the influence in October 1964. According to newspaper accounts, a provincial police officer was forced to drive onto the median of Highway 401 near Milton to avoid a head-on crash with a motorist going west in the eastbound lanes. The police officer was only shaken up but another motorist was rear-ended. Frayne pleaded guilty, was fined $400, and had his licence suspended for two years. That humiliation changed his behaviour. He gave up the sauce and never relapsed, not even when his youngest child, twenty-year-old Casey, was killed by a drunk driver on Highway 401 in 1982.
I’d found that information on microfiche in the Globe library when I was researching his wife June Callwood’s life before she died in 2007, and filed it away. When Frayne died at the age of ninety-three, on February 11, 2012, I included his drunk-driving arrest and subsequent sobriety in his obituary. Then I heard a tale allegedly told by Callwood, who had been married to Frayne for more than sixty years. Apparently Frayne, who had worked for at least three newspapers in Toronto during his long sportswriting career, had dipped into the clipping files at each of those news outlets and surreptitiously removed the story about his arrest. Lots of people go to extraordinary lengths to obscure embarrassing details about their past, so it was possible, though it didn’t gibe with what I knew about Frayne as an ethical reporter. Still, journalists are notoriously lousy interviews — cagey, controlling, even sullen when asked questions about their own lives — because they know what can happen after the tape recorder is turned off and the typing starts. The story was a good one and I wanted to use it, but first I needed to check it out. I retrieved the yellowed envelope bearing Frayne’s name and rifled through the clippings in the Globe library. And there it was — the account of his arrest. Who knows if I would have found it at the Toronto Star or Maclean’s, but it was definitely in the Globe files. To tell the truth, I was glad to find the clipping, even though it ruined a juicy anecdote, because it spoke to the man I thought Frayne was — honourable even about his own failings.
Sometimes the research changes your own life. After I wrote anthropologist Bruce Trigger’s obituary, I wanted to stand on a street corner like a contemporary ancient mariner stopping passersby to draw their attention to the significance of our loss. Trigger, who died at sixty-nine of pancreatic cancer on December 1, 2006, had a wide-ranging intellectual curios
ity that roamed across civilizations, from ancient Egyptians in Africa to the Huron Confederacy in eastern Canada. Yet few people know his name. Of his two dozen books, three are considered masterpieces: The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660; A History of Archaeological Thought; and Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. As long ago as 1986, the journalist Boyce Richardson called Aataentsic “a work of such historical imagination and literary quality that Trigger deserves to rank with Harold Innis, Northrop Frye, and Marshall McLuhan — Canadian academics known abroad for their critical imaginations and honoured at home for their contributions to Canadian self-knowledge.”
What made Trigger different from almost anyone else as a teacher, a scholar, and a human being was the thoroughness and integrity of his work. “He let the evidence speak, he didn’t rearrange history to fit his theory,” said Ursula Franklin, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, in an interview. And in contrast to many archaeologists, he had an expansive attitude to diverse sources — science, folklore, oral history — but subjected them to rigorous scrutiny.
But he wasn’t just an academic. He was a patriot who believed in building an intellectual life here. After university he went on scholarship to do a PhD in anthropology at Yale; at the time there “was no alternative to going abroad to study,” as he wrote later in a biographical essay for The Archaeology of Bruce Trigger: Theoretical Empiricism. He joined the Pennsylvania-Yale expedition to Egypt that was rescuing artifacts before the area was flooded for the Aswan Dam project, which led to his dissertation, “History and Settlement in Lower Nubia.” Despite warnings from his American colleagues that Canada was an academic backwater, he accepted an appointment at McGill University in 1964 and remained there for the next four decades. Although he continued to receive prestigious offers from abroad, he preferred to build a department and a discipline at home rather than chase international scholarly accolades.
I rarely write about people I know personally. I’d heard of Trigger but I’d never met him or studied his work. Writing his obituary gave me an insight into his research and his life. I talked to students he inspired and to his family, who spoke of the man behind the scholarship, the father who loved to chat expansively at the dinner table and who was so dear that his younger daughter hastily organized her wedding hoping it could take place in his hospital room before he died. Alas, the nuptuals had to take place without the father of the bride. I still haven’t met any of Trigger’s family, but he made such an impact on me that, after death, he was transformed from a stranger into a friend. Learning about his achievements and humanity enhanced my own life.
Myth Number Three: Obituaries Are Prewritten and Left to Moulder in a Drawer
NOBODY CAN PREDICT who will be the next to die; there is no launch complete with press kits, media tours, or scheduled interviews to help you cover a subject’s life with authority and dispatch, the way it is with elections, literary prizes, and film premieres. The immediacy and the finality of writing obituaries make my job terrifying. That’s why many obituary writers have nightmares about car crashes and heart attacks carrying off people on their “to-do” list.
As practitioners we know far too well that the well-stocked “morgue” of meticulously researched, luminously written, and conscientiously updated obituaries ready to roll as soon as the death knell tolls is the biggest myth in the business. “Some newspapers, I’m told, have hundreds of obituaries ready,” Ann Wroe, obituaries editor of the Economist, wrote in 2008. “There are ten obituaries in [our morgue] as I write, and I have never yet been able to pluck one out and use it.” In my own experience, having a prewritten obituary on file is the best guarantee of immortality, because nobody in the morgue ever seems to die. They live on, if only to haunt you for having had the effrontery to anticipate their deaths. As Ann Wroe says, they “achieve a kind of eternal life, getting wirier and stronger by the day.”
When I started writing obituaries for the Globe and Mail, I quickly discovered that the advances we did have were woefully inadequate. The previous obituary writer had died several years earlier and had not been replaced during one of those periodic downswings in the newspaper business. So nobody had been updating, revising, and writing new obituaries for ages. There were people in the advance queue — a much more delicate term than morgue — whose accomplishments had faded into obscurity, and others who had gone through career moves or political campaigns that had resulted in dynamic lifestyle changes since the advances had been filed.
Delving into our morgue was akin to winning an election and then being shown the empty coffers in the national treasury. But that shock was nothing compared to being knocked sideways by the tsunami of relief emanating from all the other reporters in the newsroom when they realized they were no longer on the hook for the advance obituaries they had postponed writing. As the official obituary writer, I had absolved them of that nerve-wracking burden.
One of my colleagues in the arts section, for example, had been working on an obit of the significant and prolific poet Irving Layton for a decade. He continued to say that he was just writing up his notes for me until the day Layton died in 2006, at age ninety-three, after suffering from dementia for nearly a decade. That was a scramble, I can tell you. Layton, who had won a Governor General’s Literary Award in 1959 for his breakthrough collection, A Red Carpet for the Sun, had both a huge oeuvre and a Byzantine personal life that involved myriad wives, partners, feuds, and offspring.
One of the best examples of writing obituaries under pressure comes from a profile of Alden Whitman, a legendary obituary writer and editor for the New York Times. As an editor, Whitman had broken the byline embargo and transformed the obituary from a news story into a biographical and literary essay, hence establishing standards he himself was forced to meet as a writer. The Times had an astounding two thousand obits in its morgue (today that figure is more like 1,300) but there wasn’t a word on Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, when he died suddenly in 1965 while on a trip to England. A huge obituary was required because Stevenson, a former governor of Illinois, had twice run for president against Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been John Kennedy’s ambassador to the United Nations during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and was still in that office under Lyndon Johnson when he succumbed to a heart attack at age sixty-five. My chest tightens just thinking about it.
Whitman heard the sorry news from his wife, who also worked at the Times. That is so often how I hear about a death too — not from my wife, of course, but from a friend or family member. Is it true? That is always my first reaction before my heart starts thudding and I scroll through my electronic Rolodex for somebody who can confirm or deny the news.
Instead of hitting the phones, Whitman, according to journalist Gay Talese’s account in Esquire magazine, “broke into a cool sweat, slipped out of the City Room,” and went to lunch upstairs in the nyt cafeteria. “But soon he felt a soft rap on his shoulder. It was one of the metropolitan editor’s assistants asking: Will you be down soon, Alden?”
Rather like being told that the time has come for your execution. The chilly equivalent of that tap has happened to me dozens of times. I’m sure I can’t prove this scientifically, but I’m convinced that noteworthy people always die late in the afternoon — or at least that’s when I hear about their demise.
Certainly that’s what happened when documentary filmmaker Allan King died of a malignant brain tumour on June 15, 2009. I had seen several of his films, including Warrendale, A Married Couple, and Dying at Grace, but I knew little about his life. The more I found out while researching and writing simultaneously to create a full-page obituary in a couple of hours, the more I realized that King’s early life had been bleaker than a Victorian melodrama. What fascinated me was the way he had channelled the deprivations of his childhood into a fascination with other people’s lives — not to ridicule or exploit his subjects, but to empathize with the frailties
of the human condition.
King was born Allan Winton in Vancouver on February 6, 1930, the elder child of an alcoholic father. His parents separated when he was six; his mother became destitute and had to put her children into foster care. She was allowed to visit them only once a month, until she found a job that paid well enough for her to reclaim them. As a teenager he discovered film: watching it, programming it at the Vancouver Film Society, and eventually making his own gritty documentaries in the early days of CBC Television in Vancouver. The films always coincided, however subtly, with the emotional traumas of his own life, from his first documentary, Skid Row (about alcoholics like his own father who lived in flophouses on Vancouver’s Eastside), to A Married Couple (about the disintegration of a marriage) to one of his last and most poignant films, Dying at Grace (portraits of people in palliative care at a Salvation Army hospital in Toronto). I suppose I could have rebelled and said: “Call the film critics; they know his work better than I do.” But then I wouldn’t have learned the outlines of the life of a cinéma-vérité pioneer who influenced a generation of filmmakers and whose work was heralded by, among others, Jean Renoir.
Working the Dead Beat Page 2
