Working the Dead Beat (46 page)

Conclusion

Ways of Saying Goodbye

T
HERE ON THE
computer screen was the familiar wide-mouthed grin of one of America's favourite humorists. Instead of a riff on presidential foibles or a chuckle about the absurdities of everyday life, Art Buchwald, the widely syndicated columnist, beamed benignly and delivered his ultimate punchline: “I'm Art Buchwald and I just died.”

It was January 17, 2007, and the obituary world had just changed as dramatically as the cinema had back in the 1920s, when filmmakers figured out how to incorporate sound into moving pictures. You've heard about living wills; welcome to living obituaries, in which the deceased speak openly about their lives and their legacies from beyond the grave.

Most major newspapers had websites by the beginning of this century. The Internet had made it possible for people around the world to read and compare obits of celebrities, politicians, and even small-town heroes. It had given locally written obituaries a diverse international audience, which was good for writers, readers, and usually the subjects, even though they weren't around to enjoy or assess the accounts of their lives. The
New York Times
, which had already launched an obituaries site with archival features and slide shows, did something much more revolutionary with the Buchwald video.

At first it seemed like a prank. After all, Buchwald had cheated death for almost a year since refusing dialysis and entering a hospice. Before long he seemed so robust that he was kicked out of palliative care and sent home. He took such delight in writing about
not
dying — in his syndicated newspaper column and a book called
Too Soon to Say Goodbye
— that his celebrity reached new heights.

But the video was not another joke. Buchwald really was announcing his own death, at eighty-one, from kidney disease. Before finally going “upstairs,” as he put it, he had recorded an interview for the
New York Times
website — the first in an ongoing but irregular video series called “The Last Word.”

As I've said earlier, the goal of a modern obituary writer is to bring the subject alive for readers — warts and all. Journalists use any and all legitimate tools to achieve that end. The video camera is only the latest in a series of visual enhancements that began with newspaper sketches and photographs. But its interactive quality and its ability to create the illusion that the subject is talking directly to a viewer in real time blurs the lines between life and death, reality and fantasy, journalism and narcissism.

Buchwald, the only son and youngest child of Jewish immigrants from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, was born on October 20, 1925, in New York City. His childhood was traumatic: his mentally ill mother was institutionalized, he was sent to an orphanage after his father's curtain manufacturing business failed during the Depression. Things didn't improve after he was reunited with his father and older sisters. He dropped out of high school and ran away from home when he was seventeen.

Although underage, Buchwald enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Second World War and served in the Pacific for two years before being demobilized as a sergeant. He went to the University of Southern California on the GI Bill, began working as a writer and editor on the campus newspaper, and in the late 1940s went to Paris, where he was eventually hired by the European edition of the
New York Herald Tribune
. His chatty, irreverent columns about characters and incidents became a big hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

Despite his fame as a humorist, Buchwald, unbeknownst to most of his readers, suffered from depression. To them he was the genial everyman. So when he spoke about his approaching death in matter-of-fact terms, discussing his living will — which stipulated he was not to be resuscitated if he fell into a coma — he was reassuring rather than ghoulish. Buchwald demystified death by defying his medical prognosis until even he seemed a bit impatient to get on with the big goodbye, and then by finally going into the great unknown with a smile on his face.

Watching him cheerfully recording the announcement of his own death before it happened changed the dynamics and the protocols of obituary writing. Instead of journalists assessing and describing the life that had just concluded, here was the subject of the obituary offering his own commentary on his life. Is that bad? Not necessarily. Everything depends on the context. The Buchwald video, which was made by
nyt
journalists, was posted on its obituary website after the humorist's death, not before, along with an explanation of this new feature and accompanied by the newspaper's print obituary.

Having interviewed people in advance for their obituaries both for print and the Web, I am still troubled by one aspect of the confidentiality clause that is part of the deal. “Talk to me about your life and I promise it won't appear during your lifetime” is the offer I always make. That pact is easy to uphold if the confidence involves admitting to a long-ago affair that many people already suspected. What happens if your subject reveals a state secret or a criminal activity? Are you going to sit on a huge scoop for five or ten years? Will your editors let you? Forget journalism — what about the law? Does a promise to a source override an obligation to bring a felon to justice while there is still time to hold him or her accountable? That's a moral and legal dilemma that will become more and more troubling as we find new ways to help the dead communicate with the living.

Another danger comes from the other side of the ledger: the insatiable demand for video uploads and links to enhance traditional reporting can undermine the objectivity of obituaries. There are already lots of legacy sites offering to produce online obituaries for grieving friends and families with the inconvenient truths obliterated. These are testimonials, and they have their place, but they are not obituaries.

These testimonials dressed up as editorial content have their roots in the local-hero obituaries that have long been a feature of small-town newspapers. American journalist Jim Nicholson gave the form a big-city flavour when he began writing “ordinary Joe” obituaries for the
Philadelphia Daily News
, a large-circulation metropolitan daily, in 1982. The
Globe and Mail
followed suit with the launch of its “Lives Lived” column, as did many other papers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Over time, though, there has been a noticeable shift from staff- or freelance-­written material to unpaid submissions from family and friends. Discerning readers can tell the difference between pieces that used to be researched and written by journalists and are now produced by grieving loved ones. Many complain of a gnawing feeling that obituaries were better written, as with everything else, in the good old days. The truth is that you usually get what you pay for — an old adage that explains the diminution of quality and objectivity that comes with running free editorial content, even if you gloss over that reality by saying you are connecting with the community.

Lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce on that endangered species editorial integrity, is the ravenous Internet maw demanding novel and robust revenue streams to boost the precarious finances of media outlets. Already many newspapers have outsourced the classified death notice business to digital companies, such as Legacy.com and Tributes.com, that link funeral parlours and grieving families to produce memorial sites and guest books.

Launched in 1988 with backing from the owners of the
Chicago Tribune
, Legacy.com survived the dot-com collapse and is now the leader in the online memorial and paid death-notice market (they also do pet and wedding announcements, organize flowers, and liaise with funeral parlours and grief counsellors). It has “partnerships” with more than eight hundred newspapers in North America, including the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, the
Toronto Star
, and the
National Post
, and is a partner with the
Times
of London, among other international newspapers. According to its website, Legacy.com creates death notices and memorials for more than two-thirds of people who die in the United States.

Legacy.com sponsored a research study undertaken by graduate students at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. The study, “The State of the American Obituary,” recommended that “collaborations” between newspapers and Legacy.com should expand. Otherwise newspapers could find themselves out of the lucrative death-notice market: the classified advertising revenue that adds to newspaper bottom lines and supports editorial obituary pages. How long will it be before Legacy.com and similar sites supply editorial content as well as paid notices? I'm not a Luddite. Partnerships are the way of the future, but we need to be steadfast in preserving editorial objectivity and integrity in editorial content. Otherwise we will jeopardize a long and venerable tradition to maximize page views.

The same year as the Buchwald video, another farewell speech hit the Internet and went viral. This video was a film of Randy Pausch, a charismatic computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, speaking in a university series called “The Last Lecture.” The idea behind the program was to invite distinguished alumni to come back to Carnegie Mellon to enlighten students and faculty with the thoughts and ideas they would like to impart in a final address.

Pausch, however, was not an aged sage. Instead he was a Jim Carrey look­alike with a similar patter and demeanour. He was forty-six and had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer when he stood in front of the lectern on September 18, 2007, to deliver a lecture titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” He spoke about his own life, illustrating his talk with slides, jokes, and pathos, and concluded by telling the audience of four hundred friends, students, and colleagues that the lecture wasn't really about childhood dreams but about his own life. Furthermore, he hadn't really prepared the lecture for his students and colleagues but as a keepsake for his own young children.

It was an inspirational talk that was recorded for people who couldn't make the lecture and then uploaded to YouTube. More than eight million people viewed the presentation, which was subsequently adapted into a book,
The Last Lecture
, with co-author Jeff Zaslow, a columnist for the
Wall Street Journal
. The book has sold millions of copies and spent years on bestseller lists.

The impact was an enormous wave of empathy for the dying computer scientist and his family. Pausch, a pioneer in the field of virtual-reality research, went from unknown academic — in the public sense — to a celebrity philosopher. In May 2008,
Time
magazine listed him as one of their 100 Most Influential People in the World. And when Pausch died two months later, on July 25, media outlets responded with huge obituaries, turning his life into a supernova that may well guarantee him immortality.

Would we have done that if he hadn't given an inspirational lecture that was posted, without copyright restrictions, at Pausch's own request, on the World Wide Web? Probably not. Was it a bad thing that Pausch manipulated the media into guaranteeing him a virtual life after death? Not entirely, because besides ensuring his legacy, his talk affected many people in positive ways.

The Buchwald and the Pausch videos represent two obituary streams that are now everywhere on the Internet: the digital enhancement of a journalistic obituary and the self-generated video designed to create a post-mortem digital legacy. But Buchwald and Pausch aren't the first and they won't be the last to reach beyond the grave with a farewell letter.

The impulse to leave a message that expresses your final thoughts and gives comfort to mourners is a very human one. But making those sentiments public catapults final messages into another dimension. It allows all of us — admirers, rivals, and foes — to creep closer to the deathbed, share in the grief of immediate friends and family, and explore the nebulous boundary between life and death. Some condemn the farewell letter as a narcissistic attempt at immortality or the final act of a control freak, but it offers benefits to both the dying and the bereaved. And thanks to the pervasiveness of social media, it forces the subject of death into the public discourse.

Memories fade or become altered with time, but a letter is a literary document that retains its original text and ensures that your words — rather than somebody else's interpretation of them — are passed on. As with the prospect of hanging, as Samuel Johnson famously said, a terminal diagnosis concentrates the mind. Writing a farewell letter, even in conjunction with others, forces you to think deeply and hard about the message you want to send and how you want to express it. For mourners, the letter can become a talisman. You can carry it in your pocket, consult it when grief wallops you, and reread it like a gospel to help you make decisions in keeping with the deceased's wishes

In August 2011, marketing genius Steve Jobs posted a final goodbye, camouflaged as a resignation letter, on the website of Apple, the computer technology company he had co-founded twenty-five years earlier. Deeply eccentric and secretive about his personal life and his health, Jobs was being as open as he could be with followers and colleagues when he posted: “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's
CEO
, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.”

He wasn't walking away — he wanted to stay on as chair of the board and he identified his choice of successor as
CEO
— but he was acknowledging, however covertly, what most people already knew: he was dying of pancreatic cancer. Jobs, known for his arrogance and abrasiveness, ended his brief letter on a tender note: “I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.” Fewer than two months later he was dead, at fifty-six.