COVID-19 rewrites the obituary
The occasion of death can turn anyone into a writer, and many people into editors.
The first obituary I ever wrote was for two children who died in a plane crash traveling between divorced parents. I still can’t conjure anything sadder. Their father, an amateur photographer, took the time to tell me the story of their lives through photographs.
It was always a good practice to have rookie reporters write a few obits. Interviewing people in grief is a reminder of the need for sensitivity, and for precision.
As city editor at the Stamford Advocate nearly 20 years ago, I promoted a star reporter to one of our assistant city editors. On his first night, I handed over the “obit log,” a clipboard with the day’s tally of the dead. We called family members every day to check the facts. One was still unconfirmed.
“I’ve never done an obit,” he sheepishly confessed. He was as good a journalist as I’ve worked with. He got even better after doing a few obits.
It was reliably the worst part of every day. We required proper name, date of birth and cause of death. Any of the three could be a challenge.
“He liked to joke he was 29. Can’t we just say that?” was asked more often than you would believe.
But it was the cause of death that could fuel dread on both ends of the phone call. Members of at least one generation were loath to cite “cancer.” For a later generation, “AIDS” produced a similar problem. Selfinflicted deaths called for particular deftness.
When we came to a stalemate, the survivors were offered the alternative of paying for a death notice. That way, they could say whatever they wanted.
There was one other caveat. Everyone on the obituary page “died.” We didn’t permit synonyms.
I fought for years to maintain the tradition of free obituaries in the Advocate and Greenwich Time. Eventually, we were the last survivors as the other Connecticut dailies transitioned to the paid model about 13 years ago. It was a matter of staffing as well as profit. I was finally swayed by a detail that had slipped by me all those years.
Most obits arrived via fax on forms survivors filled out at funeral homes. We would contact the family and do further research as needed. One day a survivor explained that he wanted to save the money the funeral home charged for faxing the completed forms to us. So grieving families had been paying for what I believed to be free.
I held onto the clipboard (it comes in useful for my son’s school projects). But I don’t miss daily conversations with people on the worst day of their lives.
Now that family members are the writers, few people “die” on the obituary pages. Yes, the word carries the coldness of an overworked mortician, but people now “pass away peacefully,” “begin a new life,” “depart this world,” “enter into rest.” Go farther South and the phrases become as flowery as magnolias. When “died” appears in obits these days, it’s often because the deceased worked in the news trade and made a last request. Some of the best scribes manage to never acknowledge the death.
Genealogists favor the old model. Eventually, so will anyone trying to trace family medical histories. But there’s a lot to embrace about turning family members into biographers.
The blunt impact of COVID-19 became apparent to print readers not long after the first related death in Connecticut last March 17. As spring arrived, our papers needed to devote additional pages to document the dead. It also illustrated the vulnerability of our cities’ populations. The New Haven Register typically devotes four pages on Sundays to “Life Tributes.” Four became eight after the coronavirus arrived. The space to obituaries in Hearst’s other seven Connecticut dailies doubled as well. Then, on one Sunday, the Register needed a dozen pages.
Our classified staff requires a death certificate, but families decide whether to reveal cause of death. Many families have opted not to cloak this dreaded virus, which has now claimed more than 7,700 lives that are documented in our special Sunday section, “Reflect. Rebuild.”
The death of Stamford’s Robert Noack Parker, a South Norwalk native, would have been notable under any circumstances. He was a tank gunner during World War II. But it was COVID that claimed this survivor of the Battle of the Bulge at age 97.
COVID brought poignancy to the pages in other ways. I didn’t recognize it at first. The added pages were not just because more people were dying. Many obituaries were considerably longer than usual. Linda Levinson oversees production for all of our papers. It gives her the vantage point to see the bigger picture. To see what I was missing.
“Without eulogies, obituaries became less of a list and more of a narrative,” Linda observed.
COVID has changed everything — including the way we honor our dead. Some families streamed modest graveside services. Others held full funerals in states with less discipline. But most were denied the ritual.
Obituaries thus became rich with small details: “He was a master of Bad Dad Jokes”... “Michele was a ferocious reader and found libraries and book stores to be the most comforting places on earth” ... “his signature bear hugs.”
Some obituaries confront the reality directly. “How do you say goodbye without actually being able to voice it? This coronavirus pandemic has caused hundreds of thousands of people to say their goodbyes silently. Sadly our family is joining that number,” were the opening words in the obituary for Stamford’s Angela Canneto, 56.
I can’t imagine handling daily obituaries in the age of COVID. But we should all appreciate the writers who speak for the dead.