Obituaries can help readers stay in touch with humanity during an overwhelming crisis. Photograph: Kzenon/Alamy Stock Photo
Over the past few weeks, we’ve learned how to think a little more like epidemiologists. Each morning, we pore over statistical models that offer grim projections about how many people might get sick, when hospital beds will run short, how many might die within our age bracket. The coronavirus pandemic, in other words, has been a plague of statistics – and our expectations about the future have suddenly come to hinge on abstractions.
In opposition stands the obituary. These brief features, a cross between a short story and a death notice, have long provided readers with a moment of particular connection within the impersonal headlines. In a crisis of this magnitude, finding the emotional space to care about a single death can feel purposeless, unnecessary. But for many obituary writers past and present, there is a belief that this unique and embattled form of journalism can help us stay in touch with our humanity.
“It’s a deluge of death at the moment,” said Adam Bernstein, obituaries editor at the Washington Post. “When you see a figure like ‘50,000 people have died’, those are numbers that make the mind reel. But it’s very hard to touch people’s hearts with numbers – that’s where we come in.”
Bernstein has been working on the death beat at the Post since 1999, and for the past decade has led a team that prides itself on the obituary craft. A good obituary, according to Bernstein, reveals surprising, intimate details about a life. “Maybe this person was most famous for being a criminal, but maybe they were also a roguish criminal with a terrific sense of humor,” Bernstein said. “Those details are what connect us to other human beings and our task is to find them.”
Since writing his first obituary as an intern at a newspaper in Bakersfield, California, Bernstein has relished the task. “It’s the hidden gem of the newsroom,” he said. But in the past month, the work has become increasingly taxing as the list of deaths they confront each morning balloons. They have churned out obituaries for notable deaths, like John Prine and Lee Konitz, while some non-coronavirus-related deaths have been sidelined.
There is also a sense of dread and suspense involved in monitoring those who have become ill. “If a well-known person is sick and it’s looking dire we make sure we have a story ready to go,” he said. “It feels like an endless game of Russian roulette and you just never know what the next day will bring.”
Janny Scott can relate to the experience of writing obituaries in a time of crisis. On 11 September 2001, Scott, then a young reporter on the New York Times metro desk, was assigned to cover, simply, “the dead”. With the city in chaos and no official victim count forthcoming, she and her colleagues trawled the streets of Manhattan collecting missing persons flyers that had become the city’s gloomy wallpaper.
As days passed, it became clear that most of the missing had died. “We began calling families and contacts, trying to piece together who these people were,” Scott told me. From these conversations, Scott and her colleagues began drawing up 250-word thumbnail sketches of those who had been lost, which were run at the back of the paper under the title “Portraits of Grief“. The paper ran almost 2,000 of these mini-obituaries in the coming months. “In New York, reading the portraits became some kind of religious ritual that helped us grieve together,” Scott said.
Obituaries and death notices can also serve an important political function during a crisis. In 1989, when obituaries at major newspapers still refused to cite Aids as a cause of death, the Bay Area Reporter published an eight-page section titled Aids Deaths, which listed all the people who had died from the illness during the previous year. Obituaries have similarly functioned as a form of advocacy around the opioid crisis, providing parents with a chance to publicly address the issue of addiction and connect with others in the community dealing with similar hardship.
As local newspapers across the nation continue to fold, however, most obituaries are now published on memorial sites, such as legacy.com, which hosts notices for more than 70% of all US deaths. During the current pandemic, these sites provide an accessible way for families to memorialize those lost at a time when obituary writers are otherwise overwhelmed.
“But the local news obituary is more than a death notice or a eulogy,” Kay Powell said. “It really should be an objective news story about one person’s life.” Powell worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1996 to 2009, where she wrote close to 2,000 obituaries about “extraordinary ordinary people”. The church choir singer who had a frontal lobotomy and donated his brain to science, the boy who sang at Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral, the woman who was Flannery O’Connor’s secret pen pal for 30 years.
Powell told me that she often fell in love with her recently deceased subjects and tried to impart this affection to her readers. But as a journalist, she also prided herself on accuracy and objectivity. She would never euphemize cause of death, believing that wider social truths about disease, mental health, addiction could be communicated more effectively through the experience of an individual. “When it is the name of somebody right there in your community, these issues are no longer some arbitrary thing affecting some number of people somewhere else,” she said.
The psychologist Paul Slovic has referred to this greater concern for the one over the many as a product of “psychic numbing”, a psychological glitch whereby, as the number in a tragedy increases, our empathy decreases. For many of us, this has intensified as the weeks pass. As the death count rises, cold-eyed statistical thinking that would have a few months ago seemed abhorrent becomes part of our daily news diet.
Of course, thinking about the pandemic in numbers is crucial. Demographic analysis shines a light on systemic truths that the individual story cannot, like how this virus is disproportionately taking lives in communities of color.
But Powell, who is in her 70s and sheltering in place alone, told me that engaging with the granularity of human suffering can shock people back into a sense of moral responsibility. “The emotion makes it harder to deny the reality of what’s happening here,” Powell said. “In the end, it keeps us better informed.”
Over the past few weeks, we’ve learned how to think a little more like epidemiologists. Each morning, we pore over statistical models that offer grim projections about how many people might get sick, when hospital beds will run short, how many might die within our age bracket. The coronavirus pandemic, in other words, has been a plague of statistics – and our expectations about the future have suddenly come to hinge on abstractions.
In opposition stands the obituary. These brief features, a cross between a short story and a death notice, have long provided readers with a moment of particular connection within the impersonal headlines. In a crisis of this magnitude, finding the emotional space to care about a single death can feel purposeless, unnecessary. But for many obituary writers past and present, there is a belief that this unique and embattled form of journalism can help us stay in touch with our humanity.
“It’s a deluge of death at the moment,” said Adam Bernstein, obituaries editor at the Washington Post. “When you see a figure like ‘50,000 people have died’, those are numbers that make the mind reel. But it’s very hard to touch people’s hearts with numbers – that’s where we come in.”
Bernstein has been working on the death beat at the Post since 1999, and for the past decade has led a team that prides itself on the obituary craft. A good obituary, according to Bernstein, reveals surprising, intimate details about a life. “Maybe this person was most famous for being a criminal, but maybe they were also a roguish criminal with a terrific sense of humor,” Bernstein said. “Those details are what connect us to other human beings and our task is to find them.”
Since writing his first obituary as an intern at a newspaper in Bakersfield, California, Bernstein has relished the task. “It’s the hidden gem of the newsroom,” he said. But in the past month, the work has become increasingly taxing as the list of deaths they confront each morning balloons. They have churned out obituaries for notable deaths, like John Prine and Lee Konitz, while some non-coronavirus-related deaths have been sidelined.
There is also a sense of dread and suspense involved in monitoring those who have become ill. “If a well-known person is sick and it’s looking dire we make sure we have a story ready to go,” he said. “It feels like an endless game of Russian roulette and you just never know what the next day will bring.”
Janny Scott can relate to the experience of writing obituaries in a time of crisis. On 11 September 2001, Scott, then a young reporter on the New York Times metro desk, was assigned to cover, simply, “the dead”. With the city in chaos and no official victim count forthcoming, she and her colleagues trawled the streets of Manhattan collecting missing persons flyers that had become the city’s gloomy wallpaper.
As days passed, it became clear that most of the missing had died. “We began calling families and contacts, trying to piece together who these people were,” Scott told me. From these conversations, Scott and her colleagues began drawing up 250-word thumbnail sketches of those who had been lost, which were run at the back of the paper under the title “Portraits of Grief“. The paper ran almost 2,000 of these mini-obituaries in the coming months. “In New York, reading the portraits became some kind of religious ritual that helped us grieve together,” Scott said.
Obituaries and death notices can also serve an important political function during a crisis. In 1989, when obituaries at major newspapers still refused to cite Aids as a cause of death, the Bay Area Reporter published an eight-page section titled Aids Deaths, which listed all the people who had died from the illness during the previous year. Obituaries have similarly functioned as a form of advocacy around the opioid crisis, providing parents with a chance to publicly address the issue of addiction and connect with others in the community dealing with similar hardship.
As local newspapers across the nation continue to fold, however, most obituaries are now published on memorial sites, such as legacy.com, which hosts notices for more than 70% of all US deaths. During the current pandemic, these sites provide an accessible way for families to memorialize those lost at a time when obituary writers are otherwise overwhelmed.
“But the local news obituary is more than a death notice or a eulogy,” Kay Powell said. “It really should be an objective news story about one person’s life.” Powell worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1996 to 2009, where she wrote close to 2,000 obituaries about “extraordinary ordinary people”. The church choir singer who had a frontal lobotomy and donated his brain to science, the boy who sang at Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral, the woman who was Flannery O’Connor’s secret pen pal for 30 years.
Powell told me that she often fell in love with her recently deceased subjects and tried to impart this affection to her readers. But as a journalist, she also prided herself on accuracy and objectivity. She would never euphemize cause of death, believing that wider social truths about disease, mental health, addiction could be communicated more effectively through the experience of an individual. “When it is the name of somebody right there in your community, these issues are no longer some arbitrary thing affecting some number of people somewhere else,” she said.
The psychologist Paul Slovic has referred to this greater concern for the one over the many as a product of “psychic numbing”, a psychological glitch whereby, as the number in a tragedy increases, our empathy decreases. For many of us, this has intensified as the weeks pass. As the death count rises, cold-eyed statistical thinking that would have a few months ago seemed abhorrent becomes part of our daily news diet.
Of course, thinking about the pandemic in numbers is crucial. Demographic analysis shines a light on systemic truths that the individual story cannot, like how this virus is disproportionately taking lives in communities of color.
But Powell, who is in her 70s and sheltering in place alone, told me that engaging with the granularity of human suffering can shock people back into a sense of moral responsibility. “The emotion makes it harder to deny the reality of what’s happening here,” Powell said. “In the end, it keeps us better informed.”