Writing obituaries (cool Wash. Post article)
Hyfler/Rosner
. . .
By Bart Barnes
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, January 2, 2005; Page C01
You have to love humor and irony, pathos and mystery,
tragedy and romance. You have to be reverent and irreverent.
You have to laugh a little or you'll go crazy.
I know. For 20 years I wrote obituaries at The Washington
Post, at least 15,000 by the time I retired in March.
I loved that work. It taught me that even in the monotony of
the daily grind, life could be funny and beautiful,
surprising and strange. Death is no big deal if you don't
love life. I only wish I could have met more of the people I
wrote about.
When death is up close, people often try to tiptoe around
it. They may speak in hushed voices. They have an acute
sense of fragility. They may look for ways to lighten up.
More than once, a man or woman phoning in the obituary of a
spouse answered with a lusty, "My pleasure!" when I thanked
them for calling. I'm sure they didn't really mean it . . .
or maybe they did.
There can be a certain quirkiness in the conversation of the
bereaved and a poignancy in their sense of what's important
in a life. I once spoke with a widow whose salient memory of
her recently deceased husband was that at the age of 6
months, he had taken second prize in a cute-baby contest in
southern Indiana. As an adult, this man was an influential
Washington lawyer, a partner in a prominent firm and
chairman of several important bar association committees.
But his widow could not stop talking about what a cute baby
he had been. Somehow, in her mind, that made him more human.
I think she was right.
There were five of us on The Post's obit desk, and we were
always looking for the offbeat, the unusual and the bizarre.
Obituaries were a rich lode to mine. We once ran a short
wire service obit of a Nazi war criminal who had been
condemned to death in Poland after World War II. He was
spared execution on the grounds of ill health. Can a man be
too sick to die? This man clearly wasn't. He lived 40 more
years and died a natural death in his nineties in a Polish
prison.
We were not unmindful that grief and sorrow were the
hallmarks of the obituary craft, but we still had to keep up
our spirits, and there were times when it was necessary for
us to laugh. We developed our own brand of gallows humor
that helped us stay sane, or at least less insane than we
otherwise might have been. We loved bad puns. When an
accountant or statistician died, his "number was up."
Innkeepers and hotel workers "checked out." We joked about
"the 'fun' in funeral." Miss Manners probably wouldn't have
approved. But we kept this banter among ourselves. We could
not leave the office with a heavy heart each night and show
up the next morning enthusiastic about our work. Writing
obituaries, we discovered, could be fun, if our hearts were
light. "Death is the occasion, but obituaries are about
life," J.Y. Smith, the founder of The Post's obit bureau,
reminded us. How right he was.
On that day in 1989 when the news wires reported the death
of Salvador Dali, our editor, Richard Pearson, read it,
grinned and declared, "Goodbye, Dali!" in a tone and manner
that recalled the old Broadway show tune he was mimicking.
Pearson was not being disrespectful. Had he been given to
benedictions -- which he was not -- this would have been his
own benediction on the life of the Spanish surrealist
painter. But it was simply his way of telling us to get
Dali's obituary -- written years in advance -- out of the
"intype" file of prepared obits and ready for publication in
the next day's paper.
Pearson died of pancreatic cancer on a dark night in
November 2003 at the age of 54, and tears were shed in the
obit bureau. But we all had some good laughs telling stories
about him at a memorial observance a month later, and that
only reinforced my conviction that humor is an effective and
healthy palliative for grief and an antidepressant for those
of us in the death business. Even the most dour of mortuary
workers, those of the omnipresent "I-feel-your-pain" public
faces, had their lighthearted moments. In the cheeriest of
voices they'd say, "We got him!" or "Yep, she's here!" when
we called to verify a death, which we did before publishing
an obituary.
It was longstanding Post policy to include the cause of
death in our obituaries, and we kept a mental tab of the
more unusual ways in which people died. We once published
the obituary of a psychiatrist who drowned in a sensory
deprivation tank. We had a man who perished in a midair
hang-gliding collision and a retired ambassador who died in
an in-line skating accident. It was a sad and tragic death,
but we all thought it was a class act that the former
diplomat was Rollerblading at the age of 79.
We wrote the obligatory obituaries of world leaders and
celebrities. But mainly we wrote about ordinary people, the
rank-and-file bureaucrats and businessmen, doctors, nurses,
teachers, letter carriers, plumbers, taxi drivers, soldiers,
sailors, airmen and Marines, most of whom had never had
their name in a newspaper. They were the people who kept the
social machinery running. Without them, there would be no
civilization. I liked to call them the real people. They
deserved an obituary in The Washington Post. There were gems
and treasures among them, and real heroes who survived
hell-on-earth experiences, recovered and returned to
society, wanting no more than the love of family and friends
and the chance to make a quiet contribution.
Helga Stein and G. Bowdoin Craighill Jr. were among my
favorites. Stein was a Jew who remained in her native
Germany throughout the Hitler era and its anti-Semitic
persecutions. During the last year of World War II, Stein
lived by her wits on the streets of Berlin, sleeping in
bombed-out buildings, scrounging and scavenging for food and
keeping one step ahead of the Nazis as the Holocaust
continued apace. For the last 11 years of her life, she was
an unofficial neighborhood "granny" in the Hillandale
community in suburban Maryland. She told stories at Girl
Scout meetings and recreation centers about what it was like
to be a Jew in the Nazi capital, and she led children's
classes in quilting and making clay figurine sculptures. She
died at 75 in 2002.
Craighill was a Washington lawyer. During World War II, he
was a naval officer and served aboard the antiaircraft
cruiser USS Atlanta when the ship was sunk in waters off
Guadalcanal in November 1942. He received the Silver Star
for gallantry under fire when his ship underwent heavy
Japanese bombardment. "The dead were simply piled up. Body
parts were thrown overboard . . . the deck was aslant,
slippery with blood and oil," he would recall 60 years
later. After the war, Craighill went back to his law
practice in Washington and specialized in trusts and
estates. He canoed and played paddle tennis, and he tossed
boomerangs, which always came back. He was an amateur ballet
dancer. He once danced the part of an animated cherry tree
in a ballet titled "The Cherry Tree Carol." He died at 88 in
2002.
There were thousands of others, such men as Marcus Bles, a
Missouri farmer who arrived in the Washington area in 1939
with $50 in his pocket and a sixth-grade education. Bles was
a self-styled "good old boy" who liked hound dogs, Stetson
hats and string ties. He raised cattle, and he bought land,
including hundreds of acres around a rural Northern Virginia
intersection known as Tysons Corner. He was worth an
estimated $50 million when he died at 81 in 1986.
In 2003, we ran an obituary of Stephen N. Jones, 82, a
Rockville physician who must have been one of the last
doctors in the Washington area to have made house calls a
regular part of his practice. His record was 51 in a single
day. We wrote about a Foreign Service officer named
Christopher P. English, whose avocation was commercial
airline travel. On long weekends, he'd book passage on a
round-trip flight to Asia or around the world, just for the
fun of flying. Rarely did he leave the airport once his
plane landed. He just got the next flight out. He was said
to have logged more than a million miles of air travel.
English died at 48 in 2000.
If there were an obituary "love is patient" award, mine
would go to Ruth Hull Bennett, who put off marriage for two
decades while she pursued a professional career. Bennett
died at the age of 101 in 1998. As a college student in
Iowa, she'd accepted a classmate's marriage proposal. But
then she went off to medical school, became a physician and
founded a Quaker hospital in India that she directed for
several years. When she returned to the United States, her
old beau, miraculously, was waiting. They married, and for
the next 25 years she was a wheat farmer's wife in Colorado.
She moved to Sandy Spring in 1979 and at 90 won a gold medal
in her age group in the 1,500-meter race-walk in the
Maryland Senior Olympics.
I'll not forget Alan Marks, a Washington stockbroker who
learned he had terminal cancer in 1997. Marks planned his
memorial service. But he hated the idea of missing it, so he
held it before he died. He called it a "celebration of life"
and invited 500 people. It was held Feb. 16, 1998, at the
University of Maryland chapel. Marks died less than three
weeks later, on March 6. "Please smile about my life. It was
a full and good one," he said in a statement read at his
grave. He was 59.
I would love to have met Eloise Randolph Page, a
stereotypical steel magnolia. She was white-gloved and
proper, a quintessential lady of Old Virginia who traced her
ancestry to Colonial times; a former Sunday school teacher
and chief of the flower committee and Altar Guild at Christ
Episcopal Church in Georgetown, where she demanded
perfection in the ironing of altar linens. In her
professional identity, Page was a top clandestine operative
of the Central Intelligence Agency. She was known as the
"Iron Butterfly." She was the CIA's first woman station
chief, and her station was Athens, where terrorists had
assassinated a predecessor. The CIA did not want us to say
where Page had served, but it was hard to see how this would
have harmed national security. Half the people at her church
knew. A CIA friend told me the agency's problem: "We deny we
have a station in Athens," he said.
Those who write obituaries learn the truth of the old
proverb that "success has many fathers while failure is an
orphan." For years, it seemed, we were always writing about
scientists who had played key roles in the development of
the atomic bomb, which helped the United States win World
War II. We must have written a dozen obituaries of men and
women who helped create modern computer technology. When
Carlton R. Sickles (D), a former Maryland congressman and
longtime Metro board member, died in January 2004, he was
widely eulogized as a "father" of the Washington area
Metrorail system. At least two other men also claimed to
have been the "father" of Metro.
We rarely were asked to write about the fatherhood of
projects, ideas and ventures that ended badly. We wrote
about the NASA scientists who worked on the Apollo and other
successful space missions but little or nothing about those
who worked on the Challenger, which exploded in January
1986, killing all seven crew members. We ran few, if any,
obituaries of the automotive engineers who participated in
the creation of Ford's disastrous Edsel.
In our dealings with families and friends of the departed --
the primary sources of information in most of our
obituaries -- we tried to tread carefully. Most of them were
having bad days, and many were prone to exaggerated notions
of how very good the person who died really was. Often they
could remember only what they wanted to remember. Sometimes
they remembered things that never happened. They were bound
to be disappointed in the obituaries we produced.
Ex-wives were among the few exceptions to this truth. They
tended to be realistic about their former husbands. They did
not expect us to write the obituary of a saint. In fact,
they did not want us to. One of the more unusual complaints
of my obituary-writing career came from an ex-wife who said
I had failed to describe how bad her ex-husband really was.
His second wife, however, loved the obituary I wrote. She
sent me flowers. A colleague suggested I send them along to
the first wife, but it seemed this would only rub salt into
her wounds.
Many ex-wives wanted to be left out of their former
husbands' obituaries, but this we could not do. We reasoned
that an obituary should be a summary of the principal events
in a life, and a marriage is a principal event. This
explanation appeared to satisfy most of the ex-wives with
whom I spoke but not all. I remember one woman who was
especially apprehensive.
"What are you going to say?" she asked.
"We'll say his marriage to you ended in divorce," I said.
She was relieved. "I only want everyone to know I divorced
him," she said.
Depending on families and friends for our obituary
information, we were not always sure we were getting the
full story. There were times when we could not tell whether
relevant, but embarrassing, facts were being left out. But
there also were times when it was obvious that something was
missing.
One obituary in particular stands out. It was of a man whose
résumé included an Ivy League college degree, service in the
Marine Corps and the CIA and a stint as an executive with an
advertising agency. For the last 15 years of his career, he
was a letter carrier. Something clearly was missing from
that picture. The man also was an alcoholic whose addiction
had cost him his white-collar career. But in the end, he
defeated his alcoholism. He quit drinking, joined Alcoholics
Anonymous and died a sober man. We included this in the
obituary, and it made it a much better story.
In any story about a life, the subject is one of the best
sources of information, but in obituaries, that person
usually was unavailable. Occasionally we did interview
public figures whose obituaries we were preparing in
advance. Two men I spoke with about their obituaries were
Clark M. Clifford, the former secretary of defense and
quintessential Washington insider; and S. Dillon Ripley II,
the longtime secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.
Clifford, in particular, was talkative. He said he was
delighted to be able to contribute firsthand to his
obituary. Unfortunately for him, he would have much
preferred the one I prepared immediately after our interview
to the one that was published. He was 79 when we met in his
law office in downtown Washington in 1986 to discuss his
obituary, which as initially written described him as a
trusted confidant and counselor to presidents, and a wise
and able helmsman to anyone needing help in navigating the
corridors of power in Washington.
But Clifford lived 12 more years and in that period became
embroiled in a banking scandal related to the collapse of
the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Charges of
fraud, conspiracy and bribe-taking eventually were set aside
on grounds of his old age and failing health, but they
nevertheless figured prominently in his obituary when he
died at 91 in October 1998.
Ripley was amused at the thought of discussing his obituary.
I had written him a note asking for a meeting and he wrote
back, signing his reply "the late Dillon Ripley." We spent a
pleasant afternoon talking about his love of ornithology;
his explorations and travels to remote parts of the world;
and his years as chief of the Smithsonian Institution, which
he liked to call "the nation's attic." He died at 87 in
2001.
It was traditional at The Post to include in obituaries
memberships and associations of the person who had died.
These ranged from religious to social and fraternal. There
were such professional groups as the Alexander Graham Bell
chapter of the Telephone Pioneers of America, to which it
seemed every C&P Telephone Co. retiree belonged. We often
wondered what telephone pioneers did when they got together.
We had similar questions about Mensa, the club for the
super-intelligent. Did they play three-dimensional chess?
One member told me they mainly talked about how smart they
were.
Some of these groups had exotic-sounding names -- Ancient
Arabic Order, Nobles of the Mystic Shrine comes to mind. But
listing these memberships was mostly routine work, and often
it was boring. Still, we had to be careful. Mistakes were
embarrassing at best and often hurtful. Several years ago, a
colleague, intending to describe someone as having been a
member of the Clans of Scotland, wrote instead that he was a
member of the Klans of Scotland, apparently thinking
subconsciously of the white-hooded "invisible empire" that
terrorized blacks, civil rights workers and others in the
American South. Fortunately, an alert copy editor spotted
the gaffe and corrected it before it got in the paper.
Would that obituary writers were always that fortunate. I
once misattributed the authorship of a short story written
by W. Somerset Maugham to Henry James, and I heard about it
for months. A colleague once got the date and location wrong
for the sinking of a Japanese battleship during World War
II, and we were inundated with demands for a correction,
which we ran in the next day's paper. At least the
corrections kept us humble, or they should have. The good
news was that they also told us our stories were being read.
Somebody cared about every single obituary we wrote.
Squish The Cat
> You really have to love life to write about death every day
> . . .
>
> By Bart Barnes
> Special to The Washington Post
> Sunday, January 2, 2005; Page C01
>
> You have to love humor and irony, pathos and mystery,
> tragedy and romance. You have to be reverent and irreverent.
> You have to laugh a little or you'll go crazy.
Thank you. That was wonderful, and truly made my day.
-lane
Matthew Kruk
> ...
> I'll not forget Alan Marks, a Washington stockbroker who
> learned he had terminal cancer in 1997. Marks planned his
> memorial service. But he hated the idea of missing it, so he
> held it before he died. He called it a "celebration of life"
> and invited 500 people. It was held Feb. 16, 1998, at the
> University of Maryland chapel. Marks died less than three
> weeks later, on March 6. "Please smile about my life. It was
> a full and good one," he said in a statement read at his
> grave. He was 59.
The preceding was particularly good. Would that so many could say so.