The Year in Death: Grim Reader Looks Back
by Michael Schaffer
DECEMBER 29, 2009 TAGS:
News cycles ebb and flow, but the dead beat never goes fallow. Still, 2009 — Grim Reader’s first year as your one-stop shop for obituary news — was an especially big one when it came to public attention for the dearly departed. Here’s Obit’s list of the year’s major themes, trends, and triumphs on the world’s obituary pages:
-The Summer of Death. Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite, John Hughes, Ed McMahon, Robert McNamara, Farrah Fawcett, Ted Kennedy, Patrick Swayze, and many more: National icons seemed to be dropping all over the place, earning obituary scribes a rare run of Page One stories. Eventually, New York Magazine — or was it The Awl? — christened it the “Summer of Death.” In good 2009 style, the moniker quickly went viral, prompting the New York Times to do some actuarial investigative journalism. The verdict: “No more celebrities had died than in past summers.”
-Obit Sociology. Real or not, the trend nonetheless prompted some interesting stabs at cultural criticism as writers strove to determine what all the nostalgic mourning meant. Grim Reader’s favorite was Vanity Fair’s David Kamp, who argued that, so long as they were alive, people like Cronkite and Kennedy and McMahon assured an aging population that their personal glory days (Kennedys in politics, avuncular white guys ruling broadcast TV, etc.) weren’t all that long ago. “The Summer of Death snuffed out all these illusions,” Kamp wrote. “The point it made, emphatically, is that the 20th century is over.”
-Mourning TV. In obits as elsewhere, interactive, socially networked mourning is supposed to be where we’re all headed. Take the death of DJ AM, a person who might not even have been a celebrity 20 years ago — and someone whose fans appeared far more eager to commiserate online than via stiff major-media obits. But the major deaths of 2009 also suggest that shared grief sends people running back to supposedly obsolete media, too. Following the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott noted that the ratings for septuagenarian CNN talker Larry King spike whenever there’s a celebrity death. “The funeral parlor of the gods,” Wolcott called the show, where an often nonsensical procession of celebs dropped by to share feelings about Jackson.
-Dead and Glossy. Meanwhile, Jackson and Kennedy, among others, were scarcely in the ground before bookstore shelves began to teem with special magazine issues devoted to the late icons. The apparent popularity of such fare — People’s Jackson tribute sells for $24.95 on eBay — stands in contrast to the media trend Judy Bachrach chronicles this month in Obit: the death of glossy magazines. Even as we opt for virtual media products on a daily basis, death and mourning, and the archiving instinct they spur, seem to still demand a tribute that is real and tangible.
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-Culture Wars, Obit Style. The obit pages reflect the society all around them, and ours remains a society deeply riven over same-sex love. No wonder, then, that 2009 was a year punctuated by controversies over the inclusion of gay partners in obits, the pronouns used in transgender obits, and other relatively new issues. By Grim Reader’s lights, the shabbiest example came when the New York Times and the Associated Press left out any mention of late drag queen Danny Larue’s 40-year committed relationship with the late Jack Hanson, even as the British press quoted Larue as saying he’d been “hysterical with grief” when Hanson died. Of course, Grim Reader has a lot of sympathy for the obit writers, who are on deadline and who learn the hard way to just leave out any fact that doesn’t come with a verifiable document — like a wedding license. Which is just to say that the really unfair thing is that same-sex couples don’t have the same access to said verifiable paperwork.
-Spinning in his Grave. Grim Reader’s award for preemptive obit chutzpah goes to Dominick Dunne, or at least to his estate. The famed chronicler of celebrity culture died Aug. 26, the same day as Ted Kennedy. But his family initially declined to confirm news of his passing, hoping to wait a day so that his death wouldn’t have to compete for obit space with Kennedy’s. The New York Times busted the manipulation, mentioning it in the second paragraph of its Dunne obit.
-What’s the Hurry? Does anyone actually get their death news from the obituary pages? Grim Reader, of course, is a subscriber to the famous Celebrity Death Beeper. Even those who aren’t are getting hurried-up reportage online on who’s kicked the bucket. (And not always accurately: False reports of Kanye West’s death briefly became a top search topic online this fall before West’s girlfriend provided — via Twitter, naturally — the 21st century’s version of Mark Twain’s famous “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” quote. “It’s totally disrespectful to make up a story like this where[sic] all human,” she wrote.) Anyway, Grim Reader wonders whether it wouldn’t make sense for staff-hemorrhaging newspapers to decouple formal obits from brief news announcements that someone had died. The obits could run a bit later, benefiting from extra time for research — and, perhaps, the chance to let the initial wave of posthumous nostalgia pass.
-We Love Bipartisans! Despite all evidence to the contrary, America still sees its political world as a place where the true heroes reach across the aisle in the name of the common good. In 2009, the Obitosphere channeled that impulse in a big way. Obits of partisan legends like Kennedy and Republican Jack Kemp all stressed — excessively, in Grim Reader’s estimation — the dead pol’s unlikely cross-party friendships and ideological comity. Ditto the tributes to Walter Cronkite, which seemed to suggest that it was Cronkite’s personal virtue, rather than his historic era, that made him a figure of cross-party trust.
-The Mean Season. Grim Reader usually snipes at obits that play down their subject’s misdeeds in the name of mourning and nostalgia. But when Robert McNamara died, the vitriol directed at the Vietnam War architect was astonishing. A Pat Oliphant editorial cartoon, for instance, depicted Satan welcoming the former Defense Secretary to Hell. “What on Earth kept you,” Satan asks. McNamara, of course, is a unique case. But Grim Reader wonders whether the future won’t feature more mean-spirited obits. With the passing of ideological warriors like Irving Kristol, the bloggy opinion world used reports of the death to make sharply critical political arguments — eschewing the traditional tactic of praising the dead guy in order to damn his heirs by comparison. Could this attitude seep into major-media obit pages, too? Consider the Wall Street Journal’s Kennedy send-off. As the New York Times’ David Carr reported, an initial, neutral online write-up received “a little political re-education” in the form of a critical Rush Limbaugh quote, by the time it showed up on Page One.
-Domestic Bliss. In a season of sharp-elbowed obituary contributions, not even former Senator/Vietnam vet Bob Kerrey’s non-tribute to McNamara — “I am not saddened by his loss” — can top this nasty-gram about Israeli writer Amos Keinan: “He was an overbearing and unbearable man, and he was unpleasant to live with; but he was a poet.” A political critic of Keinan? Um, no. It came from Christine Rochefort, his longtime paramour.
-Obits and Democracy. The Internet is supposed to herald a new age of unsuppressed information, but it doesn’t always work out that way. On the death of longtime Gabonese dictator Omar Bongo, for instance, the central African nation’s Gabonews waxed poetic about the “vastness of the vacuum which this loss will cause in our country.” Contrast that with the description in London’s Independent: “The corrupt nepotist who ruled Gabon for 40 years,” the paper calls him. Ditto the contrast between Chinese and foreign obits of Yang Xianyi. The Western write-ups all describe the literary translator’s imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution and his brave criticism of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Those details are missing in the state-controlled Chinese press.
-Reasons Culture Critics Shouldn’t Write Arts Obits. When department store owners, school board presidents, and retired newspaper publishers die, a general-assignment obit writer typically writes the story. It’s a different matter with fine arts figures, to sometimes baffling effect. Here’s the New York Times’ Alastair Macaulay on the dancer Merce Cunningham: “Over a career of nearly seven decades, Mr. Cunningham went on posing ‘But’ and ‘What if?’ questions, making people rethink the essence of dance and choreography. He went on doing so almost to the last.” Grim Reader did not wind up significantly better informed.
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-Reasons 12-Year-Old Boys Should Write Sex-Symbol Obits. When Farrah Fawcett died this summer, all the obituaries mentioned her famous pinup poster. The shot, of Fawcett in a wet bathing suit, looks conventional enough today, but was downright racy in 1977, when it sold 12 million copies. Still, the Los Angeles Times’ obit never seemed to get what made the poster such a hit. The image, it says, “showcased her feathery mane.” Well, yes, although Grim Reader can think of a more significant feature. Or, actually, two. Death, of course, is not especially sexy, but when you’re writing about sex symbols, tacky T&A does remain a rather crucial topic. But don’t take Grim Reader’s word for it: Take Fawcett’s. On the success of Charlie’s Angels, a British obit quoted her as saying, “When it got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.”
-The Mourners of Invention. At the end of a big year of celebrity death news, Grim Reader can’t help but remember a few lesser-known folks whose inventions earned them each a spot on the obit pages: Meir Amit, the former Mossad chief who developed the “honey trap” scheme to coerce people into spying; Sylvia Schur, the developer of Cran-Apple juice; and Sherwood Cryer, inventor of the mechanical bull featured in the movie Urban Cowboy. The big names of history are interesting enough, and the ways we remember them can be telling. But oftentimes the Obitosphere is simply the home of some great stories. As Grim Reader’s editor likes to say: Death will provide. See you next year.
-The Summer of Death. Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite, John Hughes, Ed McMahon, Robert McNamara, Farrah Fawcett, Ted Kennedy, Patrick Swayze, and many more: National icons seemed to be dropping all over the place, earning obituary scribes a rare run of Page One stories. Eventually, New York Magazine — or was it The Awl? — christened it the “Summer of Death.” In good 2009 style, the moniker quickly went viral, prompting the New York Times to do some actuarial investigative journalism. The verdict: “No more celebrities had died than in past summers.” -Obit Sociology. Real or not, the trend nonetheless prompted some interesting stabs at cultural criticism as writers strove to determine what all the nostalgic mourning meant. Grim Reader’s favorite was Vanity Fair’s David Kamp, who argued that, so long as they were alive, people like Cronkite and Kennedy and McMahon assured an aging population that their personal glory days (Kennedys in politics, avuncular white guys ruling broadcast TV, etc.) weren’t all that long ago. “The Summer of Death snuffed out all these illusions,” Kamp wrote. “The point it made, emphatically, is that the 20th century is over.”
-Mourning TV. In obits as elsewhere, interactive, socially networked mourning is supposed to be where we’re all headed. Take the death of DJ AM, a person who might not even have been a celebrity 20 years ago — and someone whose fans appeared far more eager to commiserate online than via stiff major-media obits. But the major deaths of 2009 also suggest that shared grief sends people running back to supposedly obsolete media, too. Following the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott noted that the ratings for septuagenarian CNN talker Larry King spike whenever there’s a celebrity death. “The funeral parlor of the gods,” Wolcott called the show, where an often nonsensical procession of celebs dropped by to share feelings about Jackson.
-Dead and Glossy. Meanwhile, Jackson and Kennedy, among others, were scarcely in the ground before bookstore shelves began to teem with special magazine issues devoted to the late icons. The apparent popularity of such fare — People’s Jackson tribute sells for $24.95 on eBay — stands in contrast to the media trend Judy Bachrach chronicles this month in Obit: the death of glossy magazines. Even as we opt for virtual media products on a daily basis, death and mourning, and the archiving instinct they spur, seem to still demand a tribute that is real and tangible.
-Culture Wars, Obit Style. The obit pages reflect the society all around them, and ours remains a society deeply riven over same-sex love. No wonder, then, that 2009 was a year punctuated by controversies over the inclusion of gay partners in obits, the pronouns used in transgender obits, and other relatively new issues. By Grim Reader’s lights, the shabbiest example came when the New York Times and the Associated Press left out any mention of late drag queen Danny Larue’s 40-year committed relationship with the late Jack Hanson, even as the British press quoted Larue as saying he’d been “hysterical with grief” when Hanson died. Of course, Grim Reader has a lot of sympathy for the obit writers, who are on deadline and who learn the hard way to just leave out any fact that doesn’t come with a verifiable document — like a wedding license. Which is just to say that the really unfair thing is that same-sex couples don’t have the same access to said verifiable paperwork.-Spinning in his Grave. Grim Reader’s award for preemptive obit chutzpah goes to Dominick Dunne, or at least to his estate. The famed chronicler of celebrity culture died Aug. 26, the same day as Ted Kennedy. But his family initially declined to confirm news of his passing, hoping to wait a day so that his death wouldn’t have to compete for obit space with Kennedy’s. The New York Times busted the manipulation, mentioning it in the second paragraph of its Dunne obit.
-What’s the Hurry? Does anyone actually get their death news from the obituary pages? Grim Reader, of course, is a subscriber to the famous Celebrity Death Beeper. Even those who aren’t are getting hurried-up reportage online on who’s kicked the bucket. (And not always accurately: False reports of Kanye West’s death briefly became a top search topic online this fall before West’s girlfriend provided — via Twitter, naturally — the 21st century’s version of Mark Twain’s famous “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” quote. “It’s totally disrespectful to make up a story like this where[sic] all human,” she wrote.) Anyway, Grim Reader wonders whether it wouldn’t make sense for staff-hemorrhaging newspapers to decouple formal obits from brief news announcements that someone had died. The obits could run a bit later, benefiting from extra time for research — and, perhaps, the chance to let the initial wave of posthumous nostalgia pass.
-We Love Bipartisans! Despite all evidence to the contrary, America still sees its political world as a place where the true heroes reach across the aisle in the name of the common good. In 2009, the Obitosphere channeled that impulse in a big way. Obits of partisan legends like Kennedy and Republican Jack Kemp all stressed — excessively, in Grim Reader’s estimation — the dead pol’s unlikely cross-party friendships and ideological comity. Ditto the tributes to Walter Cronkite, which seemed to suggest that it was Cronkite’s personal virtue, rather than his historic era, that made him a figure of cross-party trust.
-The Mean Season. Grim Reader usually snipes at obits that play down their subject’s misdeeds in the name of mourning and nostalgia. But when Robert McNamara died, the vitriol directed at the Vietnam War architect was astonishing. A Pat Oliphant editorial cartoon, for instance, depicted Satan welcoming the former Defense Secretary to Hell. “What on Earth kept you,” Satan asks. McNamara, of course, is a unique case. But Grim Reader wonders whether the future won’t feature more mean-spirited obits. With the passing of ideological warriors like Irving Kristol, the bloggy opinion world used reports of the death to make sharply critical political arguments — eschewing the traditional tactic of praising the dead guy in order to damn his heirs by comparison. Could this attitude seep into major-media obit pages, too? Consider the Wall Street Journal’s Kennedy send-off. As the New York Times’ David Carr reported, an initial, neutral online write-up received “a little political re-education” in the form of a critical Rush Limbaugh quote, by the time it showed up on Page One. -Domestic Bliss. In a season of sharp-elbowed obituary contributions, not even former Senator/Vietnam vet Bob Kerrey’s non-tribute to McNamara — “I am not saddened by his loss” — can top this nasty-gram about Israeli writer Amos Keinan: “He was an overbearing and unbearable man, and he was unpleasant to live with; but he was a poet.” A political critic of Keinan? Um, no. It came from Christine Rochefort, his longtime paramour.
-Obits and Democracy. The Internet is supposed to herald a new age of unsuppressed information, but it doesn’t always work out that way. On the death of longtime Gabonese dictator Omar Bongo, for instance, the central African nation’s Gabonews waxed poetic about the “vastness of the vacuum which this loss will cause in our country.” Contrast that with the description in London’s Independent: “The corrupt nepotist who ruled Gabon for 40 years,” the paper calls him. Ditto the contrast between Chinese and foreign obits of Yang Xianyi. The Western write-ups all describe the literary translator’s imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution and his brave criticism of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Those details are missing in the state-controlled Chinese press.
-Reasons Culture Critics Shouldn’t Write Arts Obits. When department store owners, school board presidents, and retired newspaper publishers die, a general-assignment obit writer typically writes the story. It’s a different matter with fine arts figures, to sometimes baffling effect. Here’s the New York Times’ Alastair Macaulay on the dancer Merce Cunningham: “Over a career of nearly seven decades, Mr. Cunningham went on posing ‘But’ and ‘What if?’ questions, making people rethink the essence of dance and choreography. He went on doing so almost to the last.” Grim Reader did not wind up significantly better informed.
-Reasons 12-Year-Old Boys Should Write Sex-Symbol Obits. When Farrah Fawcett died this summer, all the obituaries mentioned her famous pinup poster. The shot, of Fawcett in a wet bathing suit, looks conventional enough today, but was downright racy in 1977, when it sold 12 million copies. Still, the Los Angeles Times’ obit never seemed to get what made the poster such a hit. The image, it says, “showcased her feathery mane.” Well, yes, although Grim Reader can think of a more significant feature. Or, actually, two. Death, of course, is not especially sexy, but when you’re writing about sex symbols, tacky T&A does remain a rather crucial topic. But don’t take Grim Reader’s word for it: Take Fawcett’s. On the success of Charlie’s Angels, a British obit quoted her as saying, “When it got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.” -The Mourners of Invention. At the end of a big year of celebrity death news, Grim Reader can’t help but remember a few lesser-known folks whose inventions earned them each a spot on the obit pages: Meir Amit, the former Mossad chief who developed the “honey trap” scheme to coerce people into spying; Sylvia Schur, the developer of Cran-Apple juice; and Sherwood Cryer, inventor of the mechanical bull featured in the movie Urban Cowboy. The big names of history are interesting enough, and the ways we remember them can be telling. But oftentimes the Obitosphere is simply the home of some great stories. As Grim Reader’s editor likes to say: Death will provide. See you next year.
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