Reading Time: 6 minutes
I’m writing my older brother’s obituary. It is not a genre I want to get good at although I know there are people who are. Books have been written on how to write a good one, whatever that means, and other books have collected the most memorable. I am reminded that my brother is dead and will not read whatever the obituary says. It makes me wonder who it is for and, knowing that, who benefits from its words.
I am most familiar with obituaries of famous people. Some have been written well before the person died. Some are published before they are dead, by mistake. I almost think that’s the ideal, since then you can see what would have been said about you at your actual death.
The uncelebrated, the ordinary, the run-of-the-mill person will typically experience something different. The obituary is another burden that falls on the bereaved. In the days of local newspapers, they would appear daily as paid inclusion in the paper. I remember looking at them occasionally, when someone I knew died. I had always thought of them in the same vein as advertising although with a more helpful, community-oriented purpose.
Interestingly, a journalism researcher found that they still generate local news revenue but not very much. I was surprised that only 20% were submitted by family. I suppose this is one of those outsourcing options—Death As A Service—that one purchases along with the disposal of the body. Not surprisingly, obituaries remain a top view getter on news websites.
This experience has caused me to reflect on the place of the obituary. I don’t really know how usual or unusual my perspective is. But I don’t use any local news media and I do not search out obituaries as a regular course. As a researcher, I know they are available and I use them for research but not as a member of a community.
It is that role that seems the most important to me. An obituary tells you when that person you didn’t know on your street died. Or someone from your past—a teacher, a colleague, a classmate, even a long lost friend—had died while your lives had moved along different paths. I picture my community as a large piece of cloth, and each death in it creates a bit of a tear. An obituary lets the other people holding up the cloth know that is frayed and where and, perhaps importantly, why. The obituary may allow for some mending to go on, as people learn of the death and come to grips with it, perhaps closing up as a community and reconnecting with those who remain behind.
But what happens when you don’t have those roots? The warp and weft of your community may be upheld by people who don’t know you. What happens when you move for work or life? Or you don’t move but you don’t participate in your community in the way that we used to, when obituaries were perhaps a daily part of our information gathering. Where do you publish the obituary? Who is it for?
If you ask web search who an obituary is for, the mortuarial scientists will explain. But I’m a little skeptical, because they have an interest in obituaries. Just as for the media platforms, the death platforms like Legacy or Tributes or Remembered leverage contributed content as a business model. As I write the obituary, I keep thinking: is it because I want to honor them? Honor their memory? What does that even mean?
An obituary that attempts to capture the person is battling with a Rashomon-like challenge. More than once in the past few days, I’ve thought, “wow, I didn’t know that” or “gosh, I’d forgotten that” about some aspect of their life. Similarly, I’ve related stories to family who had no idea of our experiences. Who we are is not reflected in a single person’s perspective or stories, nor can we capture a person’s essence in words. Not only am I struggling with how to condense multiple perspectives of a loved one into a manageable bit of prose, I’m wondering why on earth to bother. Is a “published” representation of how the people who cared felt about a person meaningful, if those people are already feeling that representation on their own? Short of a biography, is there anyway to represent the details of those experiences in a way that people who didn’t know, or had lost touch with, a person would appreciate the dead the same way as that those who knew them while living?
It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I am also skeptical of the publishers. In a country like the United States of America, where public data is scraped and scored and monetized, what role does the obituary contribute to that? A person’s death sets into motion a number of legal issues. An obituary that includes a name and date and location can be bought by service providers that feed off those issues. An obituary that names surviving spouse, parents, siblings, in-laws, and offspring is creating a scraped hierarchy of personal relationships.
I would never have considered this when I was younger and reading obituaries in the paper. In particular, if I didn’t know the dead person, I mostly looked at who had survived since I might know them. On a piece of newsprint, that information seems safe now. On the internet, it’s a data point. It has a monetary value.
In case this just sounds paranoid, I have personally leaned on obituaries for research. It is one of the best places to find a woman’s maiden name, to find linkages between children (who may now be adults) and parents or between siblings. They may mention where the person attended a university (alerting the “advancement” fundraisers of those institutions) or a workplace. Obituaries are incredibly valuable to a researcher who is trying to corroborate the identify of an individual. At whose expense, though?
This is without the genealogists and other ancestral data harvesters who may grab it to enrich their own databases. I do not have first hand experience of them but I’m assuming obituaries are valuable to the people who pay a license to research the dead. It obviously can reinforce a family tree in ways that perhaps no other single document can.
And what dare I ask about what an artificial intelligence can do with obituaries? What social engineering is now possible given the ability to quickly generic a visible web of familial and social relationships? This was our biggest concern and there was a discussion about what information to leave out. In choosing to avoid specifics, though, to protect the living, we further distance the obituary from communicating to those for who it may have served a purpose.
This viewpoint is coloring my choices about what to include and what not to pass over. It may be that, to honor a memory, it is enough to provide a vague nod to virtue and avoid biography. Already, my wife and I have agreed that no mention of our family names will be included (a decision which does not extend to others, who may make difference choices). I don’t think there is a right answer to that. Already, public data is so pervasive that it is like trying to wear a mask to a protest. Unless you have been wearing a mask for the past 30 years or so, every time you left your home, you are almost certainly on a store, bank, ATM, restaurant, traffic light, elevator, neighbor’s door bell camera. What is one more? Or, perhaps, why should we contribute any more to that system?
The entire process is reminding me, uncomfortably, of the media work I did on behalf of my other brother. Here’s the reality: the world probably doesn’t care. Even for celebrities, people aren’t always aware who is alive or dead. That doesn’t mean the message doesn’t matter but it may be that you need to think about who that audience is.
I’m not sure if every culture has this but for my people, it is know as the done thing. The things we do to be accepted in society and community, whether we value them as much as other people or not. They are less like norms to me than the rules of the in crowds. You can choose to ignore them but you may find yourself ostracized or criticized. I had critical letters from my English relatives when I didn’t get married in a church and when our children didn’t go through religious birth rites. We make choices but they have consequences.
It may be that you publish a message so as to be seen to be publishing a message, not for the message itself. If, like me, the person honored in the obituary has lived in many places, do you need to publish it to all of those people? Or does the place matter less than the connection, and maybe it’s only people who have been in recent communication or fellowship who need to know?
The point is this: you may be writing this for the people who already know the deceased best. If the obituary is being written for some other purpose, it begs the question what that purpose may be. The decrease in the visibility of an obituary to one’s immediate community means that the balance—pay to display an obituary in a commercial platform, even Facebook—favors the publisher, not the bereaved.
Perhaps this is where I am most stuck. I do not know who I am writing for nor what they would want to know about my brother that they do not already know. I am overwhelmed by the unanticipated uses to which it may be put, and at whose expense my words could be used.
In the end, I threw out my initial draft. It was too long and too individual a perspective. I shortened it, threw in a few narrative hooks to give context to my brother’s kindness and big heart. It served its purpose and his wife was able to rework it into a far better, more representative piece. I was glad to see some of my perspective make it into the final draft, if only to validate that the things I knew about my brother were shared experiences and perspectives with other people who knew and loved them.
I hope to never write one again. I would do it only to take a burden off another. My wife and I discussed it and both agreed that neither of us want one when our time comes. That makes me a bit sad. Those holes in the community fabric will remain torn, perhaps unnoticed, and I wonder where that fraying leads. Yet I don’t think the dead and bereaved should bear that additional burden for their community when their life, memories, effort, and financial resources become commoditized and machined by a distant marketplace.