Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  Lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce on that endangered species editorial integrity, is the ravenous Internet maw demanding novel and robust revenue streams to boost the precarious finances of media outlets. Already many newspapers have outsourced the classified death notice business to digital companies, such as Legacy.com and Tributes.com, that link funeral parlours and grieving families to produce memorial sites and guest books.

  Launched in 1988 with backing from the owners of the Chicago Tribune, Legacy.com survived the dot-com collapse and is now the leader in the online memorial and paid death-notice market (they also do pet and wedding announcements, organize flowers, and liaise with funeral parlours and grief counsellors). It has “partnerships” with more than eight hundred newspapers in North America, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Toronto Star, and the National Post, and is a partner with the Times of London, among other international newspapers. According to its website, Legacy.com creates death notices and memorials for more than two-thirds of people who die in the United States.

  Legacy.com sponsored a research study undertaken by graduate students at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. The study, “The State of the American Obituary,” recommended that “collaborations” between newspapers and Legacy.com should expand. Otherwise newspapers could find themselves out of the lucrative death-notice market: the classified advertising revenue that adds to newspaper bottom lines and supports editorial obituary pages. How long will it be before Legacy.com and similar sites supply editorial content as well as paid notices? I’m not a Luddite. Partnerships are the way of the future, but we need to be steadfast in preserving editorial objectivity and integrity in editorial content. Otherwise we will jeopardize a long and venerable tradition to maximize page views.

  The same year as the Buchwald video, another farewell speech hit the Internet and went viral. This video was a film of Randy Pausch, a charismatic computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, speaking in a university series called “The Last Lecture.” The idea behind the program was to invite distinguished alumni to come back to Carnegie Mellon to enlighten students and faculty with the thoughts and ideas they would like to impart in a final address.

  Pausch, however, was not an aged sage. Instead he was a Jim Carrey look­alike with a similar patter and demeanour. He was forty-six and had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer when he stood in front of the lectern on September 18, 2007, to deliver a lecture titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” He spoke about his own life, illustrating his talk with slides, jokes, and pathos, and concluded by telling the audience of four hundred friends, students, and colleagues that the lecture wasn’t really about childhood dreams but about his own life. Furthermore, he hadn’t really prepared the lecture for his students and colleagues but as a keepsake for his own young children.

  It was an inspirational talk that was recorded for people who couldn’t make the lecture and then uploaded to YouTube. More than eight million people viewed the presentation, which was subsequently adapted into a book, The Last Lecture, with co-author Jeff Zaslow, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. The book has sold millions of copies and spent years on bestseller lists.

  The impact was an enormous wave of empathy for the dying computer scientist and his family. Pausch, a pioneer in the field of virtual-reality research, went from unknown academic — in the public sense — to a celebrity philosopher. In May 2008, Time magazine listed him as one of their 100 Most Influential People in the World. And when Pausch died two months later, on July 25, media outlets responded with huge obituaries, turning his life into a supernova that may well guarantee him immortality.

  Would we have done that if he hadn’t given an inspirational lecture that was posted, without copyright restrictions, at Pausch’s own request, on the World Wide Web? Probably not. Was it a bad thing that Pausch manipulated the media into guaranteeing him a virtual life after death? Not entirely, because besides ensuring his legacy, his talk affected many people in positive ways.

  The Buchwald and the Pausch videos represent two obituary streams that are now everywhere on the Internet: the digital enhancement of a journalistic obituary and the self-generated video designed to create a post-mortem digital legacy. But Buchwald and Pausch aren’t the first and they won’t be the last to reach beyond the grave with a farewell letter.

  The impulse to leave a message that expresses your final thoughts and gives comfort to mourners is a very human one. But making those sentiments public catapults final messages into another dimension. It allows all of us — admirers, rivals, and foes — to creep closer to the deathbed, share in the grief of immediate friends and family, and explore the nebulous boundary between life and death. Some condemn the farewell letter as a narcissistic attempt at immortality or the final act of a control freak, but it offers benefits to both the dying and the bereaved. And thanks to the pervasiveness of social media, it forces the subject of death into the public discourse.

  Memories fade or become altered with time, but a letter is a literary document that retains its original text and ensures that your words — rather than somebody else’s interpretation of them — are passed on. As with the prospect of hanging, as Samuel Johnson famously said, a terminal diagnosis concentrates the mind. Writing a farewell letter, even in conjunction with others, forces you to think deeply and hard about the message you want to send and how you want to express it. For mourners, the letter can become a talisman. You can carry it in your pocket, consult it when grief wallops you, and reread it like a gospel to help you make decisions in keeping with the deceased’s wishes

  In August 2011, marketing genius Steve Jobs posted a final goodbye, camouflaged as a resignation letter, on the website of Apple, the computer technology company he had co-founded twenty-five years earlier. Deeply eccentric and secretive about his personal life and his health, Jobs was being as open as he could be with followers and colleagues when he posted: “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.”

  He wasn’t walking away — he wanted to stay on as chair of the board and he identified his choice of successor as CEO — but he was acknowledging, however covertly, what most people already knew: he was dying of pancreatic cancer. Jobs, known for his arrogance and abrasiveness, ended his brief letter on a tender note: “I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.” Fewer than two months later he was dead, at fifty-six.

  His death, even though it was anticipated, dominated the news media for days and in some cases weeks, with reaction pieces, obituaries, business analyses, and lifestyle commentaries. Some pundits compared him to Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, among many others whose discoveries changed everyday life. Perhaps in some instances the reaction was overwrought, but my point is that, unlike Pausch’s “The Last Lecture,” Jobs’s farewell letter sparked speculation but didn’t unleash public mourning. After his death it was something else. It was almost as though we couldn’t allow ourselves to admit that Jobs was dying, and then, when he did die, we reacted with the shock that accompanies an assassination or a sudden heart attack or an accident. Even though most of us had never met Jobs, he had changed our lives in the way we communicate and interact with the world. Because he was such a hugely significant person, we had to figure out how we were going to carry on without him, and that, I think, explained the coverage.

  Canadian politician Jack Layton wrote a “Dear Friends” letter that was sent as an email and went viral within hours of his death at age sixty-one, from an undisclosed cancer, on August 22, 2011. Layton achieved his greatest success while fatally ill. After leading the New Democratic Party into the 2004, 2006, and 2008 elections, he really came into his own in the 2011 election, which he had spa
rked by a no-confidence motion against the minority government of Conservative leader Stephen Harper. Using a cane after surgery for a mysterious hip fracture, Layton campaigned relentlessly. His easy manner and rapport with crowds, combined with his feisty performance in the English- and French-language debates — he spoke French like a Montrealer, which appealed to Quebeckers over Harper’s functional but stilted French and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff’s Parisian accent — appealed to younger voters, especially in Quebec. As did the way he waved his cane, like a crusader stamping out corruption and waste. When the ballots were counted on May 2, Harper had his long-sought majority, the Liberals had been trounced, and the NDP had won enough seats — 103 — to form the Official Opposition.

  Layton’s public persona as “le bon Jack,” the smiling, cane-waving trooper who connected like sticky tape even with people who would never consider voting NDP, made his impending death all the more shocking. A gaunt and raspy-voiced Layton called a press conference in the middle of the summer to announce that he was taking temporary leave to fight a “new” cancer, unrelated, he said, to his 2010 diagnosis of prostate cancer. The country was still reeling when he died, four weeks later, at his home in Toronto. The response was driven partly by the Shakespearean tragedy of watching the precipitous plunge in his health at the pinnacle of his electoral success, and partly it was the timing and manner of the letter’s electronic release, mere hours after the news bulletin announcing his death.

  He’d been thinking about the letter for several weeks, and then he called together his wife, politician Olivia Chow, and two of his closest colleagues to “craft the final form” of the letter if “things didn’t go well” with his treatment, according to Brian Topp, who later ran for leadership of the party. In some ways Layton was tidying his metaphorical desk, telling the caucus and the party how to go about finding his successor and encouraging other cancer patients not to lose hope because his “journey” hadn’t ended the way he had hoped. For many the decision not to reveal details of his “second” cancer and his treatment had seemed discordant, even false, in a man who prided himself on his openness.

  Within seconds, chunks of the letter — especially the final paragraph, urging all Canadians to be “loving, hopeful, and optimistic” — were being tweeted, shared via Facebook, and digitally cut and pasted into Internet posters. Suddenly people were using social media for political conversations about Layton, his political party, and his cause. He was controlling the message even after death.

  AS THE POPULATION ages, death becomes a growth industry. That’s the six-foot-deep secret that even the most insecure of obituary writers holds dear, as a glance at the burgeoning paid death-notices in daily newspapers will confirm. The median age of Canadians went up by approximately two years from the 2001 to the 2006 census, with the number of people fifty-five and older rising by more than one million in the past five years.

  Not only are people getting older, they want to read obituaries, according to a readership survey conducted by the Media Management Centre at Northwestern University. It found that “obituaries — along with community announcements and life stories about ordinary people — have the highest potential of all news items to grow readership.” Researchers interviewed nearly forty thousand consumers in a hundred newspaper markets in the U.S. and concluded that newspaper obituaries were “important” to forty-five percent of readers, “very important” to twelve percent, and “somewhat important” to thirty-three percent.

  It is hard not to conclude that the reason people want to read obituaries has a lot to do with the aging population. People are interested in the lives, mores, and final outcomes of their own cohort, and they want to reminisce about their own times, and perhaps even feel a moment of satisfaction that they are still here to read about the ones who have gone before. What people don’t seem so interested in reading about, however, is one of the most pressing issues of our times: how people die. Medical technology has made it possible for us to linger on machines until our organs can be harvested, or our offspring can be persuaded by busy and cost-conscious medical personnel that it really is time to pull the plug on the life support systems. Faced with those choices, many aging people are seeking to control their deaths as they once tried to manage their lives.

  Whether obituary readers want to know about doctor-assisted suicide is moot. Finding a comfortable way out is a preoccupying issue for people who have been given dreadful diagnoses: patients with terminal cancer, degenerative diseases such as ALS, or various forms of dementia, among other illnesses. How an obituary writer deals with these situations is a disturbing ethical issue.

  More than a dozen years ago, Oregon became the first jurisdiction in North America to pass a “death with dignity” act. Since then more than 350 terminally ill people have taken advantage of the law to end lives that were physically untenable. (Since then, two other American states have passed similar legislations and the right to die is again before the courts in Canada and in the National Assembly in Quebec.)

  Journalists Rob Finch and Don Colburn, from the Oregonian in Portland, created “Living to the End,” a multimedia presentation in the newspaper and on its website. The subject was Lovelle Svart, a sixty-two-year-old terminally ill woman who worked through her decision to end her life in a series of diary and video interviews in which she talked about her life, her terminal lung cancer, and how she decided to end her own life rather than waiting for cancer to claim her. The hard part was determining the point at which the morphine she needed to control her progressive pain had also destroyed her independence and quality of life. Wait too long and she wouldn’t be able to swallow the lethal dose; take it too soon and she would lose some precious living time.

  The dying-with-dignity process, which is not called suicide, is complicated. To qualify, you have to be at least eighteen, a resident of Oregon, have less than six months to live according to two doctors, and pass a psychological evaluation testifying that you have no overriding medical issues (aside from coping with your own demise). But that’s not all. You must make the request either verbally or in writing, wait fifteen days before filling the prescription for the toxic potion, and be capable of ingesting it without help — injections are not allowed.

  All of which gives most people a very small window between the time when they realize they don’t want to live anymore and when they are so debilitated they are not capable of swallowing the potion. By those standards Sue Rodriguez, the B.C. woman suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease who unsuccessfully petitioned the Canadian government to end her own life in 1992, might not have been able to lift a beaker to her lips and so would not have qualified to end her life under the Oregon law.

  In taking on the assignment, Oregonian reporter Don Colburn and a team of editors and photographers were assured by their senior editors that “if we felt weak in the knees, we could drop it without rancour.” In other words, no letters in employment files about reporters refusing an assignment. Watching over another human being’s demise is a way of ushering a loved one from this mortal coil, but voyeuristically observing a complete stranger breathe her last breath could be like watching a snuff film. The Oregonian opted for delicacy and, wisely, I think, froze the video image of Svart sitting up in bed surrounded by her loved ones and let only the audio run as she grew progressively sleepier.

  The nyt broke the print mould with Art Buchwald’s legacy-making video obituary, but this multimedia presentation about an ordinary woman with an unfamiliar name brought me and thousands of readers and viewers closer to understanding the choice that an increasing number of people will face in our ageing society. There was the intimacy of hearing a dead person speak about her own life, but encased in objective reportage. And yet I empathized when Colburn, the journalist, admitted later that he still occasionally asks himself: “If we weren’t there, would she [Svart] still have done it?”

  That is the sort of ethical question all journalists must ask t
hemselves as we push the boundaries of what can be asked and shown in reporting on the final frontier of human existence. You might even call it a matter of life and death.

  Selected Bibliography

  A Note on Sources

  THE LIVES, CAREERS, and deaths of the fifty (and more) individuals discussed in this book are the result of extensive research. Not all the evidence of that research can be found in the body of the work, and I have chosen purposefully not to incorporate proof of the hundreds of telephone calls and emails that I made in researching and writing these lives. That would have made the narrative unwieldy and the book as weighty as a tombstone.

  I interviewed many of my subjects during my working life as a journalist, followed their careers over time, talked with some of them specifically for their obituaries, and spoke, after their deaths, to a wide variety of family members and colleagues. In writing this book I have re-researched the obituaries I wrote for the Globe and Mail, turning them from reportage into biographical essays; added several people I hadn’t written about — including Pierre Trudeau, “Rocket” Richard, Oscar Peterson, Maureen Forrester, Ted Rogers, and Smoky Smith — and revised everything to reflect additional research and thinking about the recent past and the history and future of obituary writing.

  What follows is a select bibliography.