The changing presentation: from the facts of death to the facts of life
Our research team brainstormed about what has changed in the world of obituaries yesterday. One consensus was the obituaries of the past were mostly about the facts of death, but it’s more about the facts of life today.
It recalled something I read from the research readings. That article was “The Changing Presentation of Death in the Obituary, 1899-1999″, which roughly analyzes the changing concept of obituaries in history.
The author gives some actual obituary examples to illustrate his idea. From what I read, in 1899, the details that would allow the reader to more fully construct a narrative about a decedent’s end-of-life experience were often printed with generous specificity, which means the focus was the physical experience of the deceased.
As a conclusion, the author says that the obituaries from the New York Times in 1899 often detailed the following seven contents:
(1) The time of death, sometimes precise to within five minutes,
(2) the names and treatment strategies of attending physicians,
(3) the strength and condition of the deceased,
(4) The discussion of complications from medical procedures,
(5) Attempts at recuperation and resuscitation,
(6) Levels of pain,
(7) Levels of consciousness.
However, this kind of information is marginalized in contemporary obituaries, such as the example from the New York Times in 1999. That obituary chronicled a number of the important biographical elements of the person’s life, such as his role in the development of the atomic bomb and in the course of the Cold War. Aside from the actual cause of death, details about the dying process are completely omitted from the newspaper report. This is typical of the manner in which the biophysical aspects of death are treated in contemporary obituaries. More biographical information was printed.
Today, obituaries still discuss death with normative themes, only the focus of the discussion has changed with the themes of resistance and self-actualization increasingly emphasized. The core concern of the most recently published obituaries studied here is the reporting of individual biography, accomplishment, and personality, as what we read today on newspaper obituary sections.