Last Writes

I’ve had obits on the brain lately.

OK, I usually have obits on the brain, to some extent. Not because I’m death-obsessed, but because I am interested in what obituaries say about lives well- and ill-lived, and what our reactions to them say about our own lives, and the state of the society in which we live.

Filmmaker Vanessa Gould must have similar thoughts, because her excellent documentary Obit—described by New York Times film reviewer Gene Seymour as profiling “The Times’s necrology team at work”—approaches the subject from the perspectives I’ve just described. In the film, Gould interviews the newspaper’s team of obituary writers about their craft. We learn more, along the way, about a number of fairly recently deceased people whose lives—for reasons obvious or explained—merited special attention in a newspaper whose very nickname, “The Old Grey Lady,” suggests the approach of rigor mortis.

But it isn’t just because I recently saw Obit—more on it shortly—that the subject is particularly prominent in my mind these days. It’s also because of a local obituary that led me to a memorial service a few weeks ago, a national obituary that sparked  headlines, and my personal history as a print journalist and occasional obituary writer.

I’ll take those things in reverse order.

When I was on the staff of the High Point Enterprise in North Carolina for most of the 1980s, about once a month I had to work the late shift on Saturday nights, remaining at the newspaper until the Sunday edition went to press after midnight. Although the “late man” (who could be and sometimes was a woman) most importantly was tasked with reporting on any big local story that might break at the last minute, such as a significant crime or fire, writing obits also came with the territory.

To be sure, this was not creative work—as much as I would like to group myself with the likes of the reporters profiled in Obit. What they do is, well, reporting. They dig for facts about the deceased through phone calls and research, and craft a succinct narrative that’s both factual and compelling. What I did was field phone calls from local funeral home officials, who dictated information to me that I then wrote up in a standardized format. As much as I love the description and idea of being part of a “necrology team,” I simply was a lone functionary plugging non-bylined words into holes (appropriately enough)—asking the same questions in sequence, adhering to a format.

Still, it actually was kind of fun. The guys (always guys) from the funeral homes were easy to deal with and always in a good mood. Whether that was because I offered them relief from the enforced somberness of interacting with grieving families, or because they regarded dealing with the press as “public relations” that behooved congeniality, or what, I don’t know. I was happy to be speaking with them—insofar as I could be happy to be spending my Saturday night working in a newspaper office. I mean, it beat running off to cover a fire or a police shooting on deadline, which almost never happened but always could happen. Writing obits was mindless, rote work—which was my absolute favorite kind at the end of a long work week. The funeral home guys were friendly and even funny, in the corny, homespun way that is the lifeblood of men whose careers are built on inoffensive chitchat and the ability to sweet-talk bereaved people into spending obscene amounts of money to objectively needless ends.

I didn’t judge them. I just asked prescribed questions and took dictation. We might also talk about the weather, or a Tar Heels’ basketball victory. We exchanged niceties while I checked correct spellings and confirmed numbers of grandchildren. We were two guys shooting the breeze while giving the recently deceased his or her final written sendoff.

So, my professional association with the obits was positive, and the documentary brought those times back to me. My work week was winding down at those moments. My truncated weekend was about to begin. After my obit duties were completed, I’d listen to my crusty old city editor Forrest Cates tell stories about bygone days at the Enterprise, where he’s started as a paperboy decades before, until the presses ran. Sometimes I’d follow him back to his house for a beer and a little late-night TV. Forrest is long dead now, of course. His obit, which merited a bylined write-up, ran years after I’d moved on and he’d retired.

But I’ve also had obits on my mind because of two recent deaths—one of a man I knew and loved, the other of a man I never met but loathed. The former was Paul Plawin, my one-time boss at the Association for Career and Technical Education (originally the American Vocational Association), and the latter was Fox News founder Roger Ailes. The two men were similar in age at death—Paul was 78 and Ailes 77. But oh what a difference in how they used those years, and what they left in their wake.

Paul’s obit was so brief and nondescript, unaccompanied by a photo, that I completely missed it in the Washington Post. I cursorily scan the section daily to see if anyone I know died, and to read obits that catch my eye for whatever reason—the prominence of the deceased, his or her age, or just a compelling headshot. I was alerted to Paul’s death by a text from a friend and former colleague, which was how I came to be at his memorial service in Northern Virginia.

To call Paul an original or one of a kind is not to do him justice. He was an old-school journalist whose professional standards were high, but whose credo was carpe diem—with whatever the Latin is word for “fun” overlapping and complementing the diem. Though most talk at the service was about what a great husband and father he’d been, Paul’s adult children’s recollections and visual props dovetailed with my memories of him as mirthmaker-in-chief.  To give you a sense of him, those props included singing, dancing toy figures of Elvis Presley and James Brown, Paul’s favorite entertainers; a mock magazine cover on which he expressively simulated electrocution while sitting in a faux prison chair; and a couple of hats he sometimes wore around the house and even in public. One came with a blond ponytail, the other with attached dreadlocks.

It was Paul who once proudly showed me the inscriptions he’d written to himself in the volumes on his office bookshelf—like, say, this appreciation in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: “To Paul, who taught me everything I’ve ever known about success in business and life. Best always, Steve Covey.” It was Paul who once shouted hysterically in a Las Vegas casino (we were in Sin City for a conference) that he was rich, rich, RICH! after positioning himself next to a nickel slot machine that someone else had just jackpotted.  It was Paul who assured us that any dreck we might write in our magazine could improve in quality if we’d just “spiff it up” a little bit.

I loved Paul’s memorial service so much that I felt compelled to share its highlights in a lengthy email that I sent a few days later to a number of his former staffers who couldn’t be there. Their replies, and their comments in commiserative emails when we all first heard the news, left no doubt that the length of an obit does not necessarily reflect the breadth of the person’s impact.

Just as the length of an obit doesn’t necessarily reflect positive breadth of impact. Take Roger Ailes. (Please.) As the founding father of an alternative-facts “news” network that’s spawned a thousand imitators, has empowered and normalized countless intolerant jerks, and has enabled and abetted the presidency of unfit, unstable man-child Donald Trump, Ailes scored lengthy obits upon his death. Of course, those accounts were lengthened by the necessity of recounting Ailes’s last-act humiliation and comeuppance—his being ousted from Fox for sexually harassing a long line of his own female employees. Still, Ailes’s death was Big News, with the column inches to prove it.

Sure, the usual suspects on the Right praised him for leveling the media-bias playing field—if willfully ignoring facts and making reportage a race to the bottom is what’s meant by  “leveling”—but even they were silent on his interpersonal monstrousness toward women. A lot of obits I read about Ailes took the form of op-eds and other opinion pieces by people who didn’t feel compelled, under the circumstances, to speak well of the dead.

Take this headline, for example, from the Onion’s AV Club: “Human Boil Roger Ailes Mourned Online with Ceaseless Parade of Insults.” Its first paragraph read: “Slug-like sexual predator and architect of today’s broken political discourse Roger Ailes died this morning, disgraced and unemployed. Online, you can read equivocating takes that attempt to contextualize his crimes with praise for his media savvy, as well as positive takes from the strong-chinned know-nothings still thriving in the house he built along with fellow sexual predator Bill O’Reilly. But mostly, what you will see online today is people lining up to take a shit on his corpse before it can even be put in the ground.”

So, not exactly an expression of deep grief and boundless thanks.

That item, in turn, linked readers to a piece by Rolling Stone political reporter Matt Taibbi that was headlined, “Roger Ailes Was One of the Worst Americans Ever.” Taibbi opined, in part, that “We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we’re that way in large part because of the hyper-divisive media environment he discovered.” Taibbi called Ailes “the Christopher Columbus of hate.”

Which legacy would you rather leave behind—Paul’s or Ailes’? And the thing is, Paul would’ve modestly downplayed the notion that he left a big, positive impact on all the people with whom he crossed paths. Ailes, on the other hand, clearly took delight in the fruits of his cynical and fraudulent handiwork.

This gets me, finally, back to Obit—the film, not the postmortem writeup itself. Documentarian Gould wisely lets the dedicated, articulate and appropriately detached members of the Times’ necrology team do the talking. And the stories they tell bespeak, in a moving way, what really survives when a person dies, and how important it is to tell those impactful stories both factually and well.

As a one-time reporter myself—and someone who struggles still with brevity in both my professional writing and in recreational pursuits like this now-1800-word blog post—one comment in Obit particularly resonated with me. I think it’s spoken by veteran Times obit writer Bruce Weber. He cites it as an old journalistic saw, and I’m sure it is, although I hadn’t heard it before.

Anyway, Weber, is talking about the daily task of researching, then shrinking down, a person’s entire life into an 800-word box on deadline. (Some obits are much longer, but that’s pretty much the standard length for write-ups on people such as, say the inventor of the Slinky.) Weber cites the scenario of an editor breathing down a writer’s neck to complete the story and release it to the news desk. “Just keep it short!” the editor screams. To which the reporter—Bruce Weber, me, anyone who’s ever tried to write anything well in a modicum of words—replies, “I don’t have time to write short!”

That is so true! But the necrology team must do that every day. In Obit, they tell some great stories. Like how a bit of research revealed that a little-remembered media consultant arguably had been instrumental in tipping the 1960 presidential race to John F Kennedy. And how the Times’s pre-written obit with the longest shelf life probably was that of high-risk teenaged aviatrix Elinor Smith, who instead would die of old age at 98 in 2010. And how the exploits of transoceanic oarsman John Fairfax nearly were lost to history.

The reporters in Obit won’t ever write about the Paul Plawins of the world—men and women who lived exemplary and inspirational lives, but who did so in ways that didn’t distinguish them from countless other individuals who fit that same description.

The Times’s necrology team members have written, and will continue to write (usually in many more than 800 words), about prominent people like Roger Ailes, entertainment figures such as Michael Jackson and Philip Seymour Hoffman (both referenced in the film), and subjects of international fascination like Princess Diana (ditto). Whoever the Times staff chooses to profile, the obituary will cover both the good and the bad in that person’s life, but will not express the writer’s opinion about any of it. Because that’s not what reporters do. Except of course, on Fox News and its many mutations.

Promise me that I can write Fox’s obit, and I’ll happily jump back in the game.