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.