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.