A good obit is a spotlight on history
Obituaries are a chance to delve into amazing life stories, writes Nicholas Boyack.
Most readers have probably never heard of Akiko Ota Omundsen, yet her life story raised major questions about war and morality. Her obituary also raised fundamental questions about what is the truth and how can you source it.
Aged 15, she was a witness to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Her father, Admiral Minoru Ota, was a highranking admiral in the Japanese navy and could be considered a war criminal for his actions at Okinawa.
After World War II, Ota Omundsen married a Kiwi, Gordon Sutherland, and came to New Zealand, where she led an interesting life fostering a better relationship with her former homeland.
Although she supported the bombing of Hiroshima (believing it shortened the war), she did not believe Japan had anything to apologise for and rejected the notion of paying compensation to prisoners of war and Korean sex slaves.
‘‘Why should they pay prisoners of war? What about my father and the people of Japan and the people who died in Hiroshima?’’ she asked in an interview in 1995. ‘‘People know wars are terrible things. The main thing is they shouldn’t ever happen again.’’
Thirty or 40 years ago, her obituary would have inevitably resulted in an angry response from the RSA and veterans. With the passage of time, the issues raised by her obituary remain relevant.
Her story raised a fundamental question – what is the truth?
Throughout her life, she defended her father, who played a significant role in the Battle of Okinawa.
Ota Omundsen argued he was against the war and that the army (and not his beloved navy) took the country into a war he did not support. In her mind, he too was a victim of war.
Depending on what you believe, Ota Omundsen was either an apologist for Japanese war crimes or someone who opposed war and wanted to learn from the mistakes of history.
Delving into Google, there are three differing views of what happened at Okinawa – the Japanese Government, the Americans and Okinawa civilians all have vastly varying narratives of a battle where hundreds of thousands died.
The job for an obituary writer is not to tell readers who was right or wrong, but to provide enough information for readers to make up their own mind.
Fortunately, most obituaries are far less complex. So how do we decide who gets an obituary?
The most interesting obituaries are generally about people who have lived interesting lives.
Gary Tricker, who died in August last year, was not a household name but his obituary revealed a fascinating character. An artist based in Wairarapa, his life and art was defined by black cats, trains and a love of rugby.
A hearing disability meant that people often pre-judged him and his response was to create an imaginary world in his head featuring black cats, railways and the rural countryside of his youth.
Overseas, his art was rated highly but in New Zealand he was less well known.
He was adored by his niece, Carol Sutherland, whom he took as his partner to art exhibitions in the 1960s where she got to meet people such as Denis Glover.
He gave 485 of his artworks to Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato in 2016 and regularly donated his art to be auctioned by charities.
When Sutherland delved into his will, she discovered he gave a fifth of his income to organisations such as Forest & Bird, and Wellington Free Ambulance.
Such public spiritedness is a common trait among many of the people featured in Stuff obituaries.
Inge Woolf and Ruth Filler, two eyewitnesses to the Holocaust, were inspiring and influential women who understood the power and danger of hatred and racism.
Woolf’s daughter Deborah Hart, chair of the Holocaust Centre, described Filler as an ‘‘incredible woman’’ who believed in tolerance but with a powerful message in her words. ‘‘The need to combat hatred and antiSemitism is more important than ever, and Ruth well understood that, and she was very staunch.’’
Agood obituary is built around research, usually involving searching digital archives, reading everything possible about a subject and talking to three or four people who knew the person well.
In the case of entertainer Max Cryer, research soon made it clear that what was known about his early life was not very much.
Close friends recounted various stories they heard from Max but much of what they said could not be verified. Rather than repeat such material, I wrote: ‘‘According to Wikipedia, John Maxwell Cryer was born in either 1935 or 1936, began playing the piano at 5 and played the double bass in the Auckland Junior Symphony Orchestra.’’
Obituaries are a public record of someone’s life and were once a staple of newspapers worldwide, but writing life stories is a fading art.
The recent death, and many beautifully written obituaries of Jim Sheeler, served as a reminder of how important obituaries are. In 2006, he received a Pulitzer prize for a project, Final Salute, where he spent a year meeting relatives of United States Marines killed in action.
A beautifully written tribute in the noted he didn’t mind not making the front page.
‘‘I knew that most of the frontpage stories would be fish wrap in a few days, while the obits would be cut and pasted on refrigerators and scrapbooks and read for generations,’’ he told an interviewer.