Gavin Hodge, who has died aged 65, was one of the first celebrity hairdressers, and became known as much for his sexual conquests as for his skills with the scissors; his era was the 1960s and 1970s, when the crimper emerged from the shadows of the salon to become a sought-after man about town.

Also, here is an excerpt from the an obit written for British Manjor-General Ken Perkins:

There were some who thought that Perkins might have climbed higher were it not for his uncompromising nature: he was never afraid to go out on a limb or to ruffle feathers by questioning the official line.

Is this more honest style of obit reporting beneficial?

ED: Also take a look at Ming’s fine post on world obituaries, which includes a section about those in Britain.

(John Thadeus Delane, courtesy of Wikipedia commons)

Kate and I had a brief, affable back and forth during discussion last week about the historical tone of obituaries — i.e., “Was the content presented directly and concisely or expressively and at length?”

Research has shown that obits have been on a creative upswing since their inception at the dawn of the printing press, beginning as short [death] notices and transforming into storytelling tools a few hundred years afterward.  Pinning down where and when this revolution took place was a much easier task than expected, and there was one particular man to thank.

A Google Archive search of the obituary’s history, though surely imperfect and hardly scientific, reveals a timeline increasingly populated by the mid- to late-1800s.  Per a bit of research, there was a name in journalism that, not coincidentally, was prevalent in regards to obit writing during that period: John Thadeus Delane, editor of The Times of London from 1841-77.

In 2007, The newspaper company’s publishing arm released Great Victorian Lives – An Era in Obituaries, a collection of some of the paper’s highest profile obits of the 1800s, and the paper’s preview singles out Delane’s contributions to obituary writing:

“… under the 36-year editorship of John Thadeus Delane (1841-77) the paper began to respond to the deaths of significant national and international figures in a style – and on a scale – that none of its rivals could match. The death of [the Duke of] Wellington, Delane told his deputy, “will be the only topic”.

For the sake of contrast, notice how the New York Times handled its front page coverage of President Lincoln’s assassination with nary an expressive word, and how that starkly differed from this, which appeared in Delane’s paper:

“The estimates of his character and of the calibre of his intellect since he was suddenly tossed to the surface of a great nation have been numerous and contradictory; but the opinion seems to be daily gaining ground that impartial history will assign to him one of the highest places among the statesmen who have hitherto presided over the North in the supreme agony of the nation.”

Ann Wroe would be proud.

First, TIME Magazine had an article this week, “What Happens to Your Facebook Profile After You Die”. Apparently if a user dies and the family can submit proof like an obituary, the profile can either be removed completely or converted into a memorial. The user then won’t show up in Facebook’s suggestions, and information like status updates won’t show up in Facebook’s news feed. This came out of complaints by users who were getting suggestions to reconnect with deceased users.

I think this whole notion of what we do with deceased people in the virtual, social world is really interesting, and you might also want to check out an older TIME article on How to Manage Your Online Life When You’re Dead. In developing ideas for our project, we’ve been grappling with the notion of a similar memorial-like page to be offered by Legacy.com. We’ll have to come up with a sensitive proposal for this idea but it’s an idea that cannot be ignored given such clear online trends in that direction.

The second trend I came across occurs has to do with how we deal with our dead in real-life. For a couple of years I lived across the street from a cemetery. I’ve often wondered — don’t ask me why — if cemeteries ever run out of space. Well apparently they do. The City of London cemetery is running out of space and has found an unusual solution by offering families to reuse old graves for their loved-one.  Think about it. Would you be willing to put your loved one in a stranger’s grave? Or better yet, would you be OK with a stranger being buried in your grave 75 years after you were buried in the same spot? Pretty disturbing to think about isn’t it? But this is a real solution to a very real problem.

One cemetery has already been forced into this practice out of sustainability issues, so this most likely will be a problem for many others sooner or later. I’ve always wondered why people insist on burying loved ones when cremation is so much cleaner, so much cheaper and we don’t have to allot whole plots of land to death. One reason, I think, is a religious one. Judaism, my religion, forbids cremation all together. Sooner or later, however, as the world gets more crowded, so will the number of the dead, and we may be forced to reevaluate and change all the ways we currently deal with our dead.

Happy Halloween everyone!

The study seems to be more about articles about the grief process and grieving in general, rather than obituary writing, but I thought what the study said was interesting and telling. Here are some highlights:

• The study asks: Is grief socially constructed by the media?

• People, the study says, look to institutions to help them understand grief and give them instructions on how to grieve. The definitions provided by institutions are never all-inclusive, and leads to “disenfranchised grief.”

• The study says the media (and I would argue the larger American popular culture) present grief as an abnormal state of mind, something to be “cured” of.

• The study found that experts gave different, conflicting messages about grieving depending on the framing of reporters’ questions.

Also interesting is that during 2000-2006 articles equated handling one’s grief “well” with handling it quickly.  The study ends by recommending that topics not be chosen/constructed with the aim of “curing” or “taming” an illness, because grief isn’t an illness, but a personal journey.

According to Danica Sherrill, a Bradenton Herald employee who spoke to me about their newspaper’s obits, the newspaper publishes between ten to twenty obits a day. The numbers always increase in the winter because all the “snow birds”, that is people who like to move to warmer locations during winter, come down to Bradenton and then some of them, of course, die.

The newspaper prints short obits of 50 words or less for free and runs longer stories about the deceased for a fee. But the most interesting thing about the Bradenton Herald is that the staff doesn’t write any of the obits, neither the free nor the longer, paid versions. The families write them all. “We don’t write them, we just publish them, “ Sherill told me.

The Greenville Sun does have staff writing their obituaries. They have a person who is not a reporter whose job is to write the basic death notices each day. Longer news stories about the deceased will be written by John Jones, the obit editor or by a staff reporter assigned to the task. All their obituaries are free.

The Greenville Sun caters to a small community of 66,000 people. As a result there are many families who have lived in the community for a long time and everyone knows everyone. As a result, Jones said, they often hold other stories for a day or two if an obituary needs to run.

“We feel that there is probably nothing short of a declaration of war that a more pressing general readership interest than the obituary section of a community newspaper,” Jones said.

My impression is that each newspaper handles obits in a way that befits their particular community. These two newspapers have two very different strategies, but strategies that clearly work.

The first discussion was about the term “obituary”. The author says that some English-language newspapers reserve the term “obituary” for staff-written obituaries and use such terms as “death notices,” “death announcements,” and the like for family-written ones. But Arabic and Persian-language newspapers do not make such a linguistic distinction but restrict the obituary pages to the family-written type and consider staff-written obituaries to be news items published in other pages of the newspaper in accordance with the importance of the deceased. That means, when famous people like presidents or major figures die, their deaths were usually reported as a news item on the front page, whereas less prominent people get written up in other pages. But when I did the interviews with staff writers with American newspapers, they told me that no matter whether the person was well-known or just an “average” person, as long as his/her life story was interesting, they would definitely choose this person to do a news obituary rather than just to put a death notice somewhere.

The second interesting discussion was about the distinct feature of British obituaries. You probably know that British obituaries are well-known for talking frankly about life and lead the supposed-to-be serious obituaries into a comic world. As discussed in this book, British newspaper obituaries have undergone a drastic change during the past twenty years or so. They are described in an article in The Economist as constituting “a genre that is changing and developing into something of a cult: obituaries as entertainment”. Their style is described as being “anecdotal, discursive, yet elegantly concise; learned, touching, and in a kindly way, often extraordinarily funny”.

Not all newspaper obituaries, however, are as “entertaining” as the British ones. Especially when we talk about obituaries in America, one may characterize them more as matter-of-fact, more serious and respectful. So the American obituaries focus more on describing the accomplishments of the deceased and both this person’s personal and professional attributes by which the writer of the obituary hopes the deceased would be remembered.

The last but not least thing I’d like to present here was the author’s observation of the difference in terms of religions.

For example, the Arabic and Persian obituaries are set in a frame of religious language much more so than are the English obituaries. They tend to quote a verse from a holy book or introduce the obituary in language borrowed from religious ceremony. The Egyptian obituaries tend not to express personal feelings toward the deceased unless the deceased is young and the death unexpected. The Persian and English obituaries tend to express more feelings: the English by using such words as “beloved,” “devoted,” and the like; the Persian by describing feelings of loss felt by the family, whole names usually appear after the text and a t times by showing concern over the happiness of the departed soul, soliciting help from friends and relative through their participation in the ceremonies. The English obituaries tend to be more formulaic in their expression of “feelings” then the Persian obituaries. The Arabic obituaries seem to be the longest and least personal of all.

I had the enviable task of compiling all of these interviews, hoping to make some inferences on the general public’s opinions of obituaries. Our sample of interviewees comprises men and women, between the ages of 21 and 42, residing in locations from New York to Boise.

One of the first questions on our list was, “When you think of an obituary, what comes to mind?” Not surprisingly, most responses sounded something like, “Death,” “Death” and “Death.” The older the interviewee was, the less likely they were to give such a straightforward answer.

Similarly, the younger a person was, the less likely they were to read obituaries on any kind of a regular basis. And why not? “The connotation of obituaries is so melancholic that it isn’t an emotion I want to tap into that often,” one responder answered. Since the start of this project, I have said that we need to let people know that obituaries are not just about death. Yes, death is the cause of the article, but it isn’t the content. (I believe this was also mentioned in Marilyn Johnson’s The Dead Beat, as well).

We got mixed reviews on our proposition to hire a professional journalist to write a loved one’s obituary. Some said “absolutely not” and others were quite keen on the idea. “It’s the quality of the writing that matters.” Anyone out there in blog land have an opinion on this idea?

There was also a wide range of answers to questions on advertising content. Several said that there shouldn’t be any advertising, which, I mean, come on. We all need to eat! Even the folks over at Legacy. Others just said to keep it tasteful, and suggested that a cigarette ad shouldn’t be on the memorial page of someone who died of lung cancer.

One of my favorite responses was to a question on what would be inappropriate on a site like Legacy.com. “Good time stuff,” one person said. She was adverse to the idea of memorial pages including adds for strip clubs, escort services and the like. I think we can all agree on that.

Personally I think advertising can be somewhat consoling in difficult times. Imagine the following scenario: You have just returned home from the funeral of a relative, such as an aunt or uncle. You’re rather bummed out and aren’t sure what to do next. You flip on the TV, and there is the talking baby E-Trade commercial. Always good for a laugh. Next comes a spot for Sonic, or some other local eatery. Now with your spirits slightly lifted, you and your other grieving relatives decide not to wallow in your sorrows and go have dinner together. With a meal in your stomach, (eating is not a grieving person’s first priority) you start to remember the funny stories about Uncle Jim, rather than just dwell on the sad fact of his death. But that’s just me…