| Burying the lede |
[Aug. 27th, 2009|03:39 pm] |
"Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay"
Death brings me out of hiding today. No, not the passing of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, my shirt-tail relative, though I hope he's enjoying a nice Irish coffee in the sky.
No, in the past two months I've been confronted with two deaths that hit slightly closer to home. One, a 35-year old professional acquaintance, and the other, a college classmate with whom I was marginally familiar. Two ostensibly intelligent, reasonably young and presumably vibrant individuals, gone.
At first this news made me sad, not just sympathetically, for theiir families, etc., but personally -- in that I am getting to the age where it's not totally ridiculous that my peers might be dropping dead, or by induction, myself.
Then it made me curious. What did they die of? Was there an accident, or a disease? Was it a common disease, a familiar villain? Or was it a rare, predatory medical mystery? Was it sudden and dramatic, or slow and emotional? Was it contageous? Could I get it? Might I have it? Can it be stopped?
But nowhere was I able to find this information. Not in the official obituaries, or related news briefs, or the funeral home guestbook pages. All these reports were frustratingly, intentionally vague.
Which made me angry. And I got stuck there, in the middle of a Kübler-Ross jumble. Why don't people include the cause of death in their death announcements?
C.C., the Official Mortality Expert of Enchanted Pants, informed me that "it's generally not relevant. And usually you can figure it out by the charity of choice."
The second reason is not applicable. And the first reason is baloney. Not relevant? If you're going to say that someone died, you should at least mention how it happened. This is a basic tenet of journalism, to say nothing of common courtesy. Announcing a death without mentioning the cause of death is like reporting who won the football game but declining to tell the score. ("The Giants lost today. They leave behind 50,000 angry drunks.")
C.C. held fast. "I think the assumption generally is that the people to whom it would really matter would know already."
This is not an acceptable excuse either, for the self-evident reason that it matters to me. It may not be important to them that I know ("them" being the deceased or his/her survivors), and I can accept their desire for privacy. But if the announcement is only for people who are already "in the know," then why make the announcement public? And if it doesn't "matter" to anyone else, then why hide it?
The whole approach is blatantly ambiguous, calling attention to the unspoken.
Then C.C. tried to shut me up by going deep and philosophical. "I think obituaries are considered more about the life than the death."
But that doesn't make any sense, either. How a story ends is usually an important part of the story, isn't it? In A Tale of Two Cities, would readers have been satisfied if Sydney Carton had inexplicably died in his jail cell? Or if The Great Gatsby simply passed away on Page 64, leaving Nick and Daisy alone with their upper-class ennui? Here, in real life, Michael Jackson died a month ago, after we watched him erode into a cadaver for the last twenty years, and people (by which I mean viewers of CNN Headline News) still want to know what the fuck happened.
Obituaries are about the life and the death, because the death is a part of life. (You know, the very last part.) People deserve to know how the story ends.
Instead, people choose to be mysterious. Instead of using the occasion to promote [disease] awareness, or even [accident] prevention, they indulge in their little secrets like 12-year old girls. How bad could it really be? And is keeping it quiet worth infuriating the rest of us?
It's almost as if they don't care about my feelings.
Or they want me to use my imagination.
So, for those of you who might eventually die, or who might be entrusted with the estate of a loved one, heed this: from now on, if I read an obituary that doesn't list a cause of death, I'm just going to assume that the deceased was crushed by a vending machine.
There's no moral judgment there, no real shame in it, but it's just graceless enough to be embarassing. Plus it will ward me away from vending machines.
So, rest in peace, dearly departed. Wherever you are, I hope there are plenty of Twix. |
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