News

This time of year always invites a stock-taking. It's almost as though celebrating the good and mourning the bad from the 12 months behind us is a prerequisite for embracing the 12 that lie ahead.

So we catalogue the best books and films, and the most noteworthy events (or the wackiest ones, as you see elsewhere in Focus), along with who was born, married, divorced — and, of course, those who died.

My beat at The Globe and Mail is the dead. This year, I have chronicled such fascinating people as wildlife artist Fenwick Lansdowne, consumer advocate Beryl Plumptre, rent-a-car tycoon Walter Tilden, theatre icon Richard Monette, free trader Simon Reisman, Charles Dubin, the judge who investigated doping in amateur sport after Ben Johnson was stripped of Olympic gold, Toronto International Film Festival co-founder Dusty Cohl and sculptor Dora de Pedery Hunt, a Hungarian emigrée who designed medals for some of our highest awards.

My profession is a venerable craft that dates back hundreds of years to the earliest days of the popular press, but it may be on life support now itself. Not only are hard economic times sparking layoffs, buyouts and other cutbacks in the newspaper business and threatening to make the obituary page an endangered species, modern technology and the Internet are having a radical impact on how we, as a society, commemorate a life — and it's not all for the good.

THE LIVING OBIT

There on the computer screen was the genial face of a celebrated American humorist beaming benignly from The New York Times website. But instead of poking fun at someone or something, he delivered his ultimate punch line: "I'm Art Buchwald and I just died."

It was Jan. 17, 2007, and at first the online video seemed like a prank. After all, Mr. Buchwald had famously cheated death for almost a year, since refusing dialysis to treat his failing kidneys and deciding to end his days in a hospice. Before long, he seemed so robust that the hospice sent him home, and he took such delight in writing about not dying — in his newspaper column and a book called Too Soon to Say Goodbye — that his celebrity reached new heights.

But it wasn't a joke. Mr. Buchwald really was announcing his own death, at the age of 81. Before finally going "upstairs," as he put it, he had recorded the first in a series the Times calls The Last Word.

You've heard about living wills; welcome to living obituaries. It seems like a fine idea, except that not everything on the Internet is produced by a qualified news organization like the Times. Social-networking and video-sharing web sites are providing an emotional platform for friends, families and even strangers to deliver messages about the departed that range from heartfelt to mawkish.

These sites draw millions of visitors and can turn ordinary people into celebrities, a tempting prospect for anyone who wants to emulate Art Buchwald's finale.

This new "exit strategy" reached its apotheosis recently with Randy Pausch, a charismatic computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh suffering from terminal pancreatic cancer. YouTube posted his "last lecture" — a presentation called Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams that the Jim Carrey look-alike gave after learning he had only a few months to live. It's a talk about his life that he illustrates with slides, jokes and pathos. Then he concludes by telling the audience of 400 friends, students and colleagues that the lecture wasn't really about childhood dreams, but how to live your life. Furthermore, he hadn't really prepared it for them, but for his own young children.

The result was an enormous wave of sympathy for the stricken man and his family. At the age of 47, Prof. Pausch went from little-known academic to celebrity philosopher and co-author of a bestseller, The Last Lecture. When he died in July, the mainstream media responded with huge obituaries he would not have received otherwise.

Clearly this phenomenon represents a challenge to traditional media outlets. If journalists are to maintain their lead in preparing dispassionate, authoritative obituaries — biographical essays that set a life in context, pay tribute to achievements and account for failures and faults — we must embrace the new technology.

At the same time, we can't abandon our standards, especially when the aging of our population is making death such a growth industry. Between the 2001 census and the one taken in 2006, the median age of Canadians went up about two years. In the past five years, the number of people 55 and older has risen by more than a million.

As well as getting older, people increasingly want to read obits. A survey conducted by Northwestern University found that "obituaries — along with community announcements and life stories about ordinary people — have the highest potential of all news items to grow readership." Researchers interviewed nearly 40,000 consumers in 100 newspaper markets in the United States and concluded that obits were "important" to 45 per cent of readers and "very important" to an additional 12 per cent.

In the hunt for greater audience share, newspaper editors and media programmers are trolling for the death readership, and they aren't above using a bit of schmaltz. Maclean's magazine has given over its back page to death — the more peculiar the better — with mini-profiles of people, and even animals, who are noteworthy for the bizarre manner or timing of their deaths.

Last summer, CBC Radio got into the act, launching The Late Show with distinguished actor Gordon Pinsent as host. Complete with lugubrious scripts and funereal music, the show featured saccharine documentaries of about "little-known, yet extraordinary" people including a street kid with "dwarfism" and an elderly man who was determined to sail through the Northwest Passage.

GREEKS TO 'MASSIVESNOB'

As a literary form, obituaries trace their lineage to the odes of the ancient Greeks. Unlike an apologia or a eulogy read at a funeral, the modern obituary is a warts-and-all biography that breathes life into the deceased one last time.

Significant public figure, flash in the pan or quirky recluse, there is no such thing as a dull life — just badly written accounts. Good obituaries, which are more akin to biography than breaking news, form part of the public record — unlike so many front-page stories that wind up as tomorrow's fish wrap.

The bald fact of somebody's death, however poignant or traumatic, is the least important part of the story. Obituaries are about life; death is merely the occasion to set the subject into context, pay tribute to successes and account for character flaws, business reverses and marital woes.

Australian obit specialist Nigel Starck writes in his book Life After Death: The Art of the Obituary that the first newspaper obit appeared in Britain in 1622. Another scholar, Elizabeth Barry of Warwick University in England, argues that the public's modern fascination with celebrity began with obituary columns in popular newspapers and magazines in the 18th century.

In the 19th century, obituary columns were dominated by windy, effusive and anonymous accounts of the exploits of great men. When the Duke of Wellington died in 1853, his massive tribute ran over several dense pages on two successive days in The Times of London. By the end of the century, maudlin deathbed scenes were creeping in because of the Victorians' preoccupation with death.

The truly irreverent newspaper obit has arisen only in the past 20 years, and the credit goes to Hugh Massingberd, the late and deeply eccentric editor who made The Daily Telegraph's obit page a must-read. He took the reins in 1986, having long coveted the job and determined to "dedicate himself to the chronicling of what people were really like through informal anecdote, description and character sketch rather than merely trot out the bald curriculum vitae."

A former editor of Burke's Peerage and expert on country houses, Mr. Massingberd (who delighted in being called "Massivesnob" by the satirical Private Eye) borrowed freely from the model established in Brief Lives by John Aubrey, a gossipy 17th-century chronicler of the rich, the eccentric and the devious. Aubrey's 20th-century biographer Anthony Powell aptly described Brief Lives as "that extraordinary jumble of biography from which later historians plundered so much of their picturesque detail."

The Daily Telegraph wasn't saddled, as was The Times, with a tradition of writing "for the record," so Mr. Massingberd could start afresh with egalitarian, eccentric and lively accounts — one of his more famous offerings died when his penile implant imploded.

Before the advent of blogs and online newspapers, he made obits "interactive." By encouraging his writers to highlight a subject's less salubrious traits and escapades in thinly veiled euphemisms, Mr. Massingberd set up a conduit between them and discerning readers capable of deciphering hidden slurs and playful meanings. Because the obituaries were unsigned, the writers were free to unsheathe their literary knives without public accountability — although readers delighted in guessing who'd written what.

He also left rival papers in the dust by turning his obituaries into a series of books that even includes Canada From Afar: The Telegraph Book of Canadians. Recently, The Economist got into this game as well.

IT PAYS TO BE PREPARED

Even before Mr. Massingberd jolted British obituary writing, Alden Whitman, the legendary, Canadian-born obituary editor of The New York Times from 1964 to 1976, had provided a lively corrective to the sonorous platitudes of the cenotaph tradition by interviewing national figures in advance as a way of making their obituaries more personal.

Since then, asking for pre-death interviews has been a twitchy but essential part of the job, especially in North America. My first time, I followed the standard editorial advice and just said I was writing a profile.

"When is your piece running?" my subject asked, not unreasonably, after we had settled into wing chairs in his living room. "Oh, it's not scheduled yet," I mumbled.

And a good thing, too, as the man lived for three more years. By then, I had added a civic accomplishment and a romantic wrinkle to his story.

This experience taught me that, editorial advice notwithstanding, the truth is the only way. But I always end the conversation by offering to update every five years. "You'll have to," the globetrotting Flora MacDonald, then 79, retorted three years ago. Her mother, she explained, had lived well past her 100th birthday.

Publications especially like the comfort of having obituaries filed in advance in case a truly famous person dies inconveniently, as actor Paul Newman did last September. His death was reported early Saturday morning, too late for The Globe and Mail's weekend edition, so we posted a news story on the website and followed with articles in the paper on Monday. Because nobody can predict when a seemingly healthy person will succumb to a heart attack, an overdose (as with actor Heath Ledger in January) or a traffic accident, most obit writers have nightmares about being caught short.

Gay Talese described just such a disaster in Mr. Bad News, his 1970s profile of Alden Whitman. One day in 1965, the great editor heard from his wife, who also worked at the paper, that Adlai Stevenson had died suddenly in England. The Times had about 2,000 advance obits on file, but none for the man who had twice run for president against Dwight D. Eisenhower.

"Whitman broke into a cool sweat, slipped out of the city room, went to lunch," Mr. Talese wrote. "He took the elevator up to the cafeteria on the 11th floor. But soon he felt a soft tap on his shoulder. It was one of the metropolitan editor's assistants, asking: 'Will you be down soon, Alden?'"

That has happened to me dozens of times, with subjects ranging from Bertha Wilson, Canada's first female member of the Supreme Court, and Richard Bradshaw, general director of the Canadian Opera Company, to Mr. Monette, the actor and former artistic director of the Stratford Festival.

I share Mr. Whitman's urge to flee, but then I hit my Rolodex to confirm the news, dig into biographical sources, intrude on grieving relatives and interview shocked sources — all in a frenzied attempt to write a piece that goes beyond the obvious and doesn't descend into eulogy.

An obituary is often the last time a deceased's name appears in print: There are no follow-up stories on the dead beat. That's why it is crucial not only to break the news, but to have the details right. And that includes making sure the person is really dead.

Don't laugh — the media have dispatched dozens of people, including Alfred Nobel, Pope John Paul II, Bob Hope, actor Abe Vigoda, the Queen Mother and, of course, Mark Twain, before their time. In 2003, The New York Times picked up a news item from The Daily Telegraph, and published an obituary of dancer and actress Katherine Sergava even though she was still alive and stayed that way for two more years. Ever since, its obits have included a clunker of a second paragraph that reports the cause of death and the source who confirmed it.

Occasionally, the gap between preparing an advance obit and needing it is eerily small. I finished writing a lengthy piece on Beland Honderich, a former publisher of The Toronto Star, and an hour later heard that he had died. Just over a year ago, famed actor William Hutt invited me to his home in Stratford, Ont., to talk about his life.

Although suffering from leukemia, he didn't expect to die any time soon — a prognosis shared by his doctors. For 90 minutes, we had a frank and wide-ranging conversation. Although completely lucid, he seemed to have transcended the quotidian world to a contemplative space I felt privileged to share. He wanted to go on living, but he wasn't afraid of death. Five days later, he died — to the shock of friends, colleagues and his obituary writer.

How I wish I'd had a video camera in my journalist's tool kit that afternoon, so that the final interview with Canada's most majestic actor — in which he discussed pacifism, patriotism, growing up at odds with his own sexuality and finding a home at the Stratford Festival — could have been captured for posterity.

ANGELS OF DEATH

Despite our curiosity about the freshly deceased, many people think that writing obituaries is a wacky preoccupation for somebody who could be out chasing fire engines. I've grown accustomed to the arched eyebrow, the flash of revulsion, the involuntary step backward, followed by: "But, that's so morbid!"

Then there are the cracks about the Angel of Death, the speculation about "who's on your slab today?" And the jokes, of course: "How's life on the dead beat?" Even the obituary writer played by Jude Law in the 2004 film Closer derisively describes himself as toiling in "the Siberia of journalism." Is it any wonder many of my colleagues consider themselves the Rodney Dangerfields of the newsroom?

In a bid to get a little respect (as well as to compare notes with others on my beat), I joined the Society of Professional Obituary Writers (SPOW) this year and attended its founding workshop in Portland, Ore. The first time I Googled the society's acronym, I came up with "sex position of the week," but SPOW's backstory is almost as spicy — a tale of rivalry, power struggles and journalistic standards that began in a bar in North Dallas in the late 1990s.

Carolyn Gilbert, a high-school English teacher turned consultant, was tossing a few back with a group of friends and fellow obit junkies, when it suddenly occurred to her that she should convene the First Great Obituary Writers' Conference. ("I just said it as a lark," she later told The New Yorker. "I'm not even sure what I meant — whether I meant great obituaries, great writers or great conference.")

The initial gathering was in Archer City, the hometown of Texas writer Larry McMurtry and the setting for his novel The Last Picture Show. Two years later, Ms. Gilbert expanded, forming the International Association of Obituarists and soliciting dues to support www.obitpage.com, a compendium of memorable obituaries, book reviews and blurbs about upcoming conferences.

She also found a new venue for the third conference: the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas (New Mexico, not Nevada) — a restored Wild West saloon and hostelry seen in such films as No Country For Old Men. After that, she attracted the weird, the wannabes, the professionals and the curious to sessions in such places as Bath, England, and a tiny village in upstate New York named after ancient King Alfred.

In the early years, Nigel Starck was a mainstay and American writer Marilyn Johnson came to conduct research for her bestselling The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries. But there also were some arcane participants, such as EllynAnne Geisel, an "apron archeologist" and the author of Apronisms: Pocket Wisdom for Every Day. She talked (a lot) about the more than 400 aprons she has collected.

Conference activities were equally unconventional, featuring gatherings in cemeteries, personal appearances by the "Grim Reaper," much quaffing of martinis and ritualized recitals of obit highlights, such as this description of Liberace from The Daily Telegraph: "He is the summit of sex, the pinnacle of masculine, feminine and neuter, everything that he, she and it can ever want."

Or a favourite of mine, the Telegraph's sendoff for one of Britain's notorious Kray twins: "Ronnie was sensitive about his sexual peccadilloes — 'I'm not a poof; I'm a homosexual,' he asserted. He seduced the East End boys he recruited as spies, and his parties were 'highly sophisticated.' "

By last year, though, zany and eccentric began to pale when the closing speaker at the poorly attended session in Alfred, N.Y., was somebody Ms. Gilbert had met at the bar the night before. Tensions between professional journalists and the obit junkies led to such radical suggestions as inviting celebrity speakers, rather than oddballs, producing a formal agenda in advance and sending out a call for academic papers. In the end, plans to hold the 10th gathering in Toronto fell apart after a clash of wills and standards between Ms. Gilbert and Globe obituaries editor Colin Haskin, who was the local convener.

The SPOW workshop in Portland emerged like a phoenix from the ashes of this conflict. About two dozen of us congregated at the Chapel Pub, a converted funeral home from the 1930s, to discuss ethics, professional standards, whether to report suicides, virtual obituaries and, of course, "the code" — the delicate business of telling the truth without devastating grieving relatives.

That is the eternal question. How much life is too much in an obituary? When I was writing about Jack Duffy, the Canadian singer, comic actor and Frank Sinatra look-alike, his family pleaded with me to ignore his alcoholism. I refused because it was true, Mr. Duffy himself had spoken publicly about it and, most important, he had triumphed over his addiction. He swallowed his last alcoholic drink in 1967 — an accomplishment that said something about him as a person.

Dead people can't sue for libel, but writing about them involves sharing the grief of those they have left behind and an unusual degree of intimacy. A good obituary writer always tells the truth, but also invokes the code, an unspoken agreement based on the assumption that readers are canny enough to realize that someone described as "restlessly romantic" was probably a chronic philanderer.

The classic example is people who "die suddenly" from no apparent cause. That's the traditional camouflage for suicide, and coincidentally, SPOW was meeting in what was, until last month, when Washington State voted in favour of doctor-assisted suicide, North America's only jurisdiction that allowed the terminally ill to hasten their own demise.

It has been almost 12 years since Oregon passed its Death with Dignity Act, and about 350 dying people have taken advantage of the law. Last year, Rob Finch and Don Colburn, journalists at Portland's The Oregonian, smashed the code's suicide taboo in no uncertain terms with a special project that appeared online and in the newspaper.

Living to the End tracks the final moments of a 62-year-old woman named Lovelle Svart, and includes video diaries in which she talks about her life, her terminal lung cancer and her decision when to end it all. She didn't want to wait for the cancer to kill her; the hard part was deciding when the morphine she needed to control her pain also would destroy her independence and quality of life. Wait too long, and she wouldn't be able to swallow the lethal dose; take it too soon and she would lose some precious living time.

Watching a loved one's last breath is a profoundly human experience, but doing the same for a complete stranger can be perversely voyeuristic. Wisely, The Oregonian froze the video image with Ms. Svart sitting up in bed surrounded by family and friends, letting just the audio run as the drugs made her ever more sleepy. The result was award-winning journalism.

POSTMORTEM

That's what modern technology can do in the hands of trained professionals.

The New York Times got the multimedia ball rolling with Art Buchwald, but the story of Lovelle Svart, an ordinary woman with no public profile, did even more — it educated and made a point. The intimacy of hearing a dead person speak about her own life, encased in objective reportage, brought me and thousands of others closer to understanding the choice that an increasing number of people will face in our aging society.

And yet, I empathized when Mr. Colburn, the writer, admitted to the SPOW workshop that he still occasionally asks himself: "If we weren't there, would she still have done it?"

That is the sort of ethical question all journalists must ask themselves as we push the boundaries of what can be told and shown in reporting on the final frontier of human existence. You might even call it a matter of life and death.

Senior feature writer Sandra Martin is The Globe and Mail's chief obituary writer