Working the Dead Beat (47 page)

His death, even though it was anticipated, dominated the news media for days and in some cases weeks, with reaction pieces, obituaries, business analyses, and lifestyle commentaries. Some pundits compared him to Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, among many others whose discoveries changed everyday life. Perhaps in some instances the reaction was overwrought, but my point is that, unlike Pausch's “The Last Lecture,” Jobs's farewell letter sparked speculation but didn't unleash public mourning. After his death it was something else. It was almost as though we couldn't allow ourselves to admit that Jobs was dying, and then, when he did die, we reacted with the shock that accompanies an assassination or a sudden heart attack or an accident. Even though most of us had never met Jobs, he had changed our lives in the way we communicate and interact with the world. Because he was such a hugely significant person, we had to figure out how we were going to carry on without him, and that, I think, explained the coverage.

Canadian politician Jack Layton wrote a “Dear Friends” letter that was sent as an email and went viral within hours of his death at age sixty-one, from an undisclosed cancer, on August 22, 2011. Layton achieved his greatest success while fatally ill. After leading the New Democratic Party into the 2004, 2006, and 2008 elections, he really came into his own in the 2011 election, which he had sparked by a no-confidence motion against the minority government of Conservative leader Stephen Harper. Using a cane after surgery for a mysterious hip fracture, Layton campaigned relentlessly. His easy manner and rapport with crowds, combined with his feisty performance in the English- and French-language debates — he spoke French like a Montrealer, which appealed to Quebeckers over Harper's functional but stilted French and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff's Parisian accent — appealed to younger voters, especially in Quebec. As did the way he waved his cane, like a crusader stamping out corruption and waste. When the ballots were counted on May 2, Harper had his long-sought majority, the Liberals had been trounced, and the
NDP
had won enough seats — 103 — to form the Official Opposition.

Layton's public persona as “
le bon Jack
,” the smiling, cane-waving trooper who connected like sticky tape even with people who would never consider voting
NDP
, made his impending death all the more shocking. A gaunt and raspy-voiced Layton called a press conference in the middle of the summer to announce that he was taking temporary leave to fight a “new” cancer, unrelated, he said, to his 2010 diagnosis of prostate cancer. The country was still reeling when he died, four weeks later, at his home in Toronto. The response was driven partly by the Shakespearean tragedy of watching the precipitous plunge in his health at the pinnacle of his electoral success, and partly it was the timing and manner of the letter's electronic release, mere hours after the news bulletin announcing his death.

He'd been thinking about the letter for several weeks, and then he called together his wife, politician Olivia Chow, and two of his closest colleagues to “craft the final form” of the letter if “things didn't go well” with his treatment, according to Brian Topp, who later ran for leadership of the party. In some ways Layton was tidying his metaphorical desk, telling the caucus and the party how to go about finding his successor and encouraging other cancer patients not to lose hope because his “journey” hadn't ended the way he had hoped. For many the decision not to reveal details of his “second” cancer and his treatment had seemed discordant, even false, in a man who prided himself on his openness.

Within seconds, chunks of the letter — especially the final paragraph, urging all Canadians to be “loving, hopeful, and optimistic” — were being tweeted, shared via Facebook, and digitally cut and pasted into Internet posters. Suddenly people were using social media for political conversations about Layton, his political party, and his cause. He was controlling the message even after death.

AS THE POPULATION
ages, death becomes a growth industry. That's the six-foot-deep secret that even the most insecure of obituary writers holds dear, as a glance at the burgeoning paid death-notices in daily newspapers will confirm. The median age of Canadians went up by approximately two years from the 2001 to the 2006 census, with the number of people fifty-five and older rising by more than one million in the past five years.

Not only are people getting older, they want to read obituaries, according to a readership survey conducted by the Media Management Centre at Northwestern University. It found that “obituaries — along with community announcements and life stories about ordinary people — have the highest potential of all news items to grow readership.” Researchers interviewed nearly forty thousand consumers in a hundred newspaper markets in the U.S. and concluded that newspaper obituaries were “important” to forty-five percent of readers, “very important” to twelve percent, and “somewhat important” to thirty-three percent.

It is hard not to conclude that the reason people want to read obituaries has a lot to do with the aging population. People are interested in the lives, mores, and final outcomes of their own cohort, and they want to reminisce about their own times, and perhaps even feel a moment of satisfaction that they are still here to read about the ones who have gone before. What people don't seem so interested in reading about, however, is one of the most pressing issues of our times: how people die. Medical technology has made it possible for us to linger on machines until our organs can be harvested, or our offspring can be persuaded by busy and cost-conscious medical personnel that it really is time to pull the plug on the life support systems. Faced with those choices, many aging people are seeking to control their deaths as they once tried to manage their lives.

Whether obituary readers want to know about doctor-assisted suicide is moot. Finding a comfortable way out is a preoccupying issue for people who have been given dreadful diagnoses: patients with terminal cancer, degenerative diseases such as
ALS
, or various forms of dementia, among other illnesses. How an obituary writer deals with these situations is a disturbing ethical issue.

More than a dozen years ago, Oregon became the first jurisdiction in North America to pass a “death with dignity” act. Since then more than 350 terminally ill people have taken advantage of the law to end lives that were physically untenable. (Since then, two other American states have passed similar legislations and the right to die is again before the courts in Canada and in the National Assembly in Quebec.)

Journalists Rob Finch and Don Colburn, from the
Oregonian
in Portland, created “Living to the End,” a multimedia presentation in the newspaper and on its website. The subject was Lovelle Svart, a sixty-two-year-old terminally ill woman who worked through her decision to end her life in a series of diary and video interviews in which she talked about her life, her terminal lung cancer, and how she decided to end her own life rather than waiting for cancer to claim her. The hard part was determining the point at which the morphine she needed to control her progressive pain had also destroyed her independence and quality of life. Wait too long and she wouldn't be able to swallow the lethal dose; take it too soon and she would lose some precious living time.

The dying-with-dignity process, which is not called suicide, is complicated. To qualify, you have to be at least eighteen, a resident of Oregon, have less than six months to live according to two doctors, and pass a psychological evaluation testifying that you have no overriding medical issues (aside from coping with your own demise). But that's not all. You must make the request either verbally or in writing, wait fifteen days before filling the prescription for the toxic potion, and be capable of ingesting it without help — injections are not allowed.

All of which gives most people a very small window between the time when they realize they don't want to live anymore and when they are so debilitated they are not capable of swallowing the potion. By those standards Sue Rodriguez, the B.C. woman suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease who unsuccessfully petitioned the Canadian government to end her own life in 1992, might not have been able to lift a beaker to her lips and so would not have qualified to end her life under the Oregon law.

In taking on the assignment,
Oregonian
reporter Don Colburn and a team of editors and photographers were assured by their senior editors that “if we felt weak in the knees, we could drop it without rancour.” In other words, no letters in employment files about reporters refusing an assignment. Watching over another human being's demise is a way of ushering a loved one from this mortal coil, but voyeuristically observing a complete stranger breathe her last breath could be like watching a snuff film. The
Oregonian
opted for delicacy and, wisely, I think, froze the video image of Svart sitting up in bed surrounded by her loved ones and let only the audio run as she grew progressively sleepier.

The
nyt
broke the print mould with Art Buchwald's legacy-making video obituary, but this multimedia presentation about an ordinary woman with an unfamiliar name brought me and thousands of readers and viewers closer to understanding the choice that an increasing number of people will face in our ageing society. There was the intimacy of hearing a dead person speak about her own life, but encased in objective reportage. And yet I empathized when Colburn, the journalist, admitted later that he still occasionally asks himself: “If we weren't there, would she [Svart] still have done it?”

That is the sort of ethical question all journalists must ask themselves as we push the boundaries of what can be asked and shown in reporting on the final frontier of human existence. You might even call it a matter of life and death.

 

Selected Bibliography

A Note on Sources

T
HE LIVES, CAREERS,
and deaths of the fifty (and more) individuals discussed in this book are the result of extensive research. Not all the evidence of that research can be found in the body of the work, and I have chosen purposefully not to incorporate proof of the hundreds of telephone calls and emails that I made in researching and writing these lives. That would have made the narrative unwieldy and the book as weighty as a tombstone.

I interviewed many of my subjects during my working life as a journalist, followed their careers over time, talked with some of them specifically for their obituaries, and spoke, after their deaths, to a wide variety of family members and colleagues. In writing this book I have re-researched the obituaries I wrote for the
Globe and Mail
, turning them from reportage into biographical essays; added several people I hadn't written about — including Pierre Trudeau, “Rocket” Richard, Oscar Peterson, Maureen Forrester, Ted Rogers, and Smoky Smith — and revised everything to reflect additional research and thinking about the recent past and the history and future of obituary writing.

What follows is a select bibliography.

General References

The Canadian Encyclopedia

CBC
Archives

Dictionary of Canadian Biography

Encyclopedia of Music in Canada

Encyclop
æ
dia Britannica

Factiva

Library and Archives Canada

The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature

Who's Who

Who's Who in Canada

Who's Who in America

Wikipedia

Books

Allen, Max, ed.
Ideas That Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs.
Owen Sound, ON: Ginger Press, 1997.

Anderson, Doris.
Rebel Daughter: An Autobiography.
Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1996.

Anderson, Ellen.
Judging Bertha Wilson: Law as Large as Life.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press for the Osgoode Society, 2001.

Andrews, Audrey.
Be Good, Sweet Maid: The Trials of Dorothy Joudrie.
Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1999.

Ari
è
s, Philippe.
The Hour of Our Death.
London: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Aubrey, John.
Brief Lives: A Selection Based upon Existing Contemporary Portraits
, edited by
Richard Barber. London: Folio Society, 1975.

Avery, Donald H.
The Science of War: Canadian Scientists and Allied Military Technology During the Second World War.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

Barris, Alex.
Oscar Peterson: A Musical Biography
. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2002.

Batten, Jack.
Honest Ed's Story: The Crazy Rags to Riches Story of Ed Mirvish.
Toronto: Doubleday, 1972.

Berton, Pierre.
Drifting Home.
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1973.

.
My Times: Living with History, 1947–1995.
Toronto: Doubleday, 1995.

.
Starting Out, 1920–1947.
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987.

Bishop-Gwyn, Carol.
The Pursuit of Perfection: A Life of Celia Franca.
Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2011.

Boorstin, Daniel J.
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.
New York: Harper & Row, 1964.

Bowering, George, and Jean Baird, eds.
The Heart Does Break: Canadian Writers on Grief and Mourning
. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2009.

Brodie, Paul.
Ambassador of the Saxophone.
Bala, ON: Paul Brodie, 2000.

Brown, Adele O.
What a Way to Go: Fabulous Funerals of the Famous and Infamous.
San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001.

Bruce, Robert V.
Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude.
London: Victor Gollancz, 1973.

Buchwald, Art.
Too Soon to Say Goodbye
. New York: Random House, 2006.

Callwood, June
. Love, Hate, Fear, Anger, and the Other Lively Emotions
. Toronto: Doubleday, 1964.

.
Twelve Weeks in Spring: The Inspiring Story of Margaret and Her Team.
Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2003.

Cambon, Kenneth.
Guest of Hirohito.
Vancouver: PW Press, 1990.

Cameron, Elspeth.
And Beauty Answers: The Life of Frances Loring and Florence Wyle.
Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2007.

.
Irving Layton: A Portrait.
Toronto: Stoddart, 1985.

Careless, J. M. S.
Brown of the Globe
. Vol. 1,
The Voice of Upper Canada, 1818–1859
. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1959.

.
Brown of the Globe.
Vol. 2,
Statesman of Confederation, 1860–1880
. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1963.

Carrier, Roch.
The Hockey Sweater
,
translated by Sheila Fischman. Montreal: Tundra, 1984.

.
Our Life with the Rocket: The Maurice Richard Story
, translated by Sheila Fischman.
Toronto: Viking, 2001.

Chan, Anthony B.
Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World.
Vancouver: New Star Books, 1983.

Clarkson, Stephen, and Christina McCall.
Trudeau and Our Times.
Vol. 1,
The Magnificent Obsession
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990.

.
Trudeau and Our Times.
Vol. 2,
The Heroic Delusion
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994.

Cohen, Andrew, and Jack Granatstein, eds.
Trudeau's Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1999.

Cohen, Leonard.
Book of Longing.
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006.

Colquhoun, Keith, and Ann Wroe, eds.
The Economist Book of Obituaries.
London: Profile Books, 2008.

Cook, Ramsay.
Canada and the French Canadian Question
. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1962

.
The Teeth of Time: Remembering Pierre Elliott Trudeau
. Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006.