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.
