Not the last word on obituaries

Editor's Notes

When I started out in journalism, I used to joke that I wouldn’t mind writing obituaries at The Washington Post — if only I could work at The Washington Post. But I didn’t get to the Post, and even if I had, I would have found out quickly about the dying art of obituary writing. At first, the obit job was relegated to newsroom clerks. Then, at most newspapers, obituaries moved out of newsrooms and into the advertising departments.

How sad.

At their best, obituaries are gifts to families and to readers. They are stories about the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people in our midst. They offer a sense of history. They are news.

At their worst, they’re just death notices. Or revenue sources.

We still treat obituaries as news at the Tracy Press. Call us old-fashioned, but consider this: Have you ever gone out of town for a week and returned home, drawn to the stack of newspapers you haven’t read — not for the front-page headlines, but for the obituaries? Have you ever cut out the obituary of a relative and put it in a Bible to be read, over and over?

Age turns many of us into serious readers of obits, but so does connection with a community. Odds are you wouldn’t read the Vitals page if you didn’t think there was a chance you’d recognize a name.

I thought writing obituaries would be easy — entry-level journalism. But I was wrong. It’s painful to talk to people at times of great stress. It’s not easy to sum up a life with complete accuracy.

Every so often, obits open windows on how dysfunctional families can be. I recently found myself explaining to the mother of a woman who had died that I take obituaries very seriously. Yes, we get our information from funeral homes, which charge families for filling out the forms they fax to us. But we always try to talk to family members or close friends to verify the facts and make sure we don’t leave anything out.

The mother, obviously grieving, wondered why we had included memorial information in the obit that was given to us from her late daughter’s boyfriend. He had lived with the woman for more than a decade, but he wasn’t her husband. He shouldn’t even be listed.

That reminded me of the people who had listed only half of the survivors, leaving out an entire side of the family tree. It wasn’t because they were forgetful; they preferred an exclusive survivor list. I found out after the obituary published, so I wrote a new one — an accurate one — to run the next day.

So obit-writing can get complicated.

Alas, over the years, I’ve seen cultural shifts in the obituaries. “Significant others” and then “partners” shocked readers when they started showing up. So did the obituaries for babies who had died at birth. More than once, we’ve had requests to name favorite pets. Or to tell short anecdotes. Or to rerun the obit because they forgot something.

We try to comply.

Of course, some people think we’re ogres because we have a certain style in which we write our obituaries. They’ve wanted us to use euphemisms, such as how someone “leapt into the arms of Jesus” or “rode his Harley to the hereafter.” We prefer the simple word “died.”

Mostly, we consider obituaries to be an integral part of the newspaper, and we are deeply committed to running free obituaries for anyone who has ever lived in Tracy.

And now that I’m a seasoned editor, I can finally write obituaries whenever I want.

It’s not bad to have the final word.

The truth about journalism

Editor's Notes

I used to think that journalists were labeled as cynics because of our training. Professors and editors teach budding reporters to sneer at public relations wizards and propagandists. Pity the poor PR students who learn to spin the news for their future clients.

But that’s a little harsh. Most of the time, press releases, calls and tips lead to good stories. But not always.

A few weeks ago, a local woman called the newsroom to see if someone would write a story about her plight: Young mother suffers from brain tumor.

My cousin died after suffering from a brain tumor diagnosed when she was just her age. I know about brain tumors.

Brain tumors don’t usually become newspaper stories, though, unless the story is unusually heart-wrenching. In this case, the story is that a 25-year-old woman has a malignant vascular tumor on the right side of her brain. Doctors give her three months to live, but Medi-Cal, her only health insurance, will pay only for standard surgery, one that could destroy her ability to form new memories.

“I would rather die than not be able to remember my children,” the woman told reporter Malcolm Maclachlan. Her children are 1, 5 and 8 years old.

An alternative surgery, she said, would allow doctors to enter her brain through her ear rather than her skull. It could leave her deaf in one ear but wouldn’t harm her memory. Because it is considered experimental, she said, Medi-Cal won’t pay the full cost.

She needs $17,983 for her portion.

“They might as well have told me it was a million,” the woman told Maclachlan.

She’s a high school dropout and too sick to hold a job, she said, and her husband, a West High graduate, supports the family on his $11-an-hour job at Home Depot.

The story passes the heart-wrenching test. However, good journalists are trained to talk to other sources. It’s one way to sort out the truth. Or not.

Maclachlan called Les Brooks, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Health Services, which oversees Medi-Cal. She confirmed that the woman who talked to us has been treated for migraines and back pain but said her department lists no brain tumor in the woman’s records.

“What information we have is very different,” she said.

Dr. Khanh Do of Tracy Family Practice said he has treated the woman at his office for the conditions Brooks identified. But when Maclachlan showed him the medical forms that the woman provided — with his name scrawled at the bottom — he said the signature was not his. And he said he didn’t know about a tumor.

At this point, the reporter went back to the woman and told her that the medical professionals have contradicted her story. But she stuck by her claims.

Who is telling the truth?

Sylvia Drew Ivie, project director with the California Endowment, a private group that gives grants to community-based healthcare centers, said it’s not entirely out of the question that doctors would try to limit care to a destitute Medi-Cal patient.

As a managed care institution that takes Medi-Cal patients, Tracy Family Practice could be under tremendous pressures to limit costs.

Ivie’s own husband died in March of a brain tumor, she said, and navigating his care was incredibly difficult, even though they were fully insured, middle-aged and well-versed in medical matters. So for someone like the woman who called us — young, uneducated and, perhaps, heavily medicated and suffering memory loss from a tumor — navigating the Medi-Cal system could be nearly impossible.

But too many details don’t match up. The woman said she had a CAT scan. Patients with brain tumors are usually scanned using magnetic resonance imaging, or MRIs. A neuroscientist who commented on the woman’s description of the surgery option said it doesn’t make sense. She also said she only has four pages of medical records. I had more pages than that for an impacted wisdom tooth.

If the woman falsified medical forms, possibly with the goal of getting out of welfare obligations, she could face charges. A check of San Joaquin County Superior Court records shows she already has convictions on charges of driving under the influence of alcohol and narcotics.

So amid the waving red flags, I ask myself: Am I ethically obligated to report this woman to legal authorities? No. Should the reporter testify against her, if it comes to that? Never. Will others be duped by this woman? Maybe.

Call me a skeptic, but for now, her plight is a warning to others and a reminder to ourselves that the truth is worthy of pursuit.

And that’s the story.