The last word
NBY ISOLDE D. AMANTE
owhere is a newspaper most likely to omit something than in its obituaries. Peers interviewed for the piece will say nothing but praise for the dead, out of sympathy for their grieving families. We make the newly departed seem like saints. But at that point, the man or woman of the hour will be past caring, completely free at last from the burden of other people’s expectations.
In the last 25 years, no local paper, broadcast outfit or online publication has devoted a reporter full-time to the writing of obits. (“The dead beat” is not a job most people would kill for.) Even the Manila broadsheets, with their larger teams, rarely go beyond a brief death notice in its obituary or memorial page. As a result, the decision of whose deaths to write about is shaped by prevailing editorial values and business priorities, and it’s mostly the prominent who have merited obituary space in the papers.
Indeed, while the practice of publishing obituaries in the newspapers dates back to 1731, it wasn’t until the 1980s in the United States that the “common man” obituary began to see print. This trend was pointed out in “The State of the American Obituary,” written in November 2009 by Ashley Bates, Ian Monroe, and Ming Zhuang for the Interactive Innovation Project class at Medill University. These obituaries told the stories of “people who lived interesting lives” although they may have been neither “important nor notorious.” We can point out that all lives are interesting and important, but the great majority will, nevertheless, pass away unreported.
Some of the best obituaries around are those in The Economist, whose writers consistently attempt to present a story that’s neither a hagiography nor a hatchet job. Of the serial killer Charles Manson, this newspaper said that he “lived by his own truth.” In its obituary for Corazon Aquino in 2009, The Economist wrote that the formerly apolitical housewife’s rise to power “was a tumultuous time for the Philippines, a country that has never been easy to take seriously.” Yet as mean as its obituary writers could get, the paper always tried to present an honest picture, no matter how its readers might respond. Editor Ann Wroe recalled that their American readers were “incensed” when she wrote that Osama bin Laden, whom American soldiers gunned down in his fortress in Pakistan in May 2011, “enjoyed taking his children to the beach and eating yogurt with honey.”
“When I found out ordinary things about bin Laden, I wanted to put them in,” Wroe said in a June 2017 interview. “Why not mention them? You have to try and give a rounded picture of a person. They’re not entirely monsters. There’s a human somewhere in there. And that should make their evil all the more horrific by contrast.”
As I wrote this essay, more than 83,028 persons had died in different parts of the world in only the first 12 hours of Saturday. (The website worldometers.info also showed there were 47,867,402 deaths so far this year, the numbers rising every second.) Few of these deaths would ever see print, but some of the newly departed would be written about in online guest books or memorial pages. Briefly, their Facebook page will become a hive of activity, as loved ones and friends post all the praise and thanksgiving that, one hopes, the individual had been made aware of before he or she died.
The only person whose grave I will visit this week never had a Facebook page, and while the few obituaries written of him were uniformly kind, they were, in the end, incomplete. Which is inevitable. They mentioned his work and community associations but left out his mercurial temper (which mellowed with age), his ability to tell a joke deadpan, his occasional snobbery, his worries and his hopes, and his unfailing ability to forgive. Obituaries are part-mythmaking, part-mystery; they can conceal as much as they reveal. (isolde.amante@gmail.com)