As obituaries editor of the Telegraph, I’m often asked if I find my job depressing. “Doesn’t it get you down?” people say in hushed, sympathetic tones, as though we were huddled together in the plushly upholstered confines of a Mayfair undertakers. “I mean, dealing with that relentless tide of death…” At which point I trot out a line well worn by those in my particular area of journalism: “Obituaries are not about death,” I insist. “They are a celebration of life.”
To illustrate my case, nothing more is required than a quick reference to the lives that have crossed my desk that day. How about the chap who traversed the Himalayas in a hovercraft? Or the spy who saved Churchill at the Tehran Conference? Or even the man who provided the voice for the puppet George (a “shy, pink and slightly camp hippopotamus”) on the children's television programme, Rainbow? In the obituary world, all human life is there – every barmy, uplifting scrap of it.
And if by some chance my morale was to falter for a second, then a moment’s reflection on the existence of Gay Kindersley, the amateur jump jockey who died last April, would restore the spirits. He wasn’t particularly famous, or the finest horseman of his generation, but as our obit recalled, Kindersley was “blessed with a barrel-load of charm”. It must have come in handy when he conducted the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother on a tour of his house at East Garston, only to step into a room with the royal visitor and find a couple in flagrante. “How nice,” she murmured. It’s hard to get too down in the dumps when presented with tales like that. And on the obits desk we are constantly presented with tales like that.
It seems that we are not the only ones to take this view. Next weekend London’s Southbank Centre is running a festival entitled “Death: Festival for the Living”. It aims to examine the rules and regulations, customs, traumas, idiosyncrasies, mysteries – and, yes, even joys – that surround mankind’s attitude to mortality.
According to Jude Kelly, the Southbank’s artistic director, it will be anything but melancholy. “I expect it to be a very jolly event,” she says. That sounds about right to me. After all, the most celebrated sketch in British comedy involves death (albeit of a certain Norwegian Blue parrot: “He’s a stiff. Bereft of life, he rests in peace. If you hadn’t nailed him to his perch he’d be pushing up the daisies!”) Visitors to newspaper offices have been known to inquire: “Who are those people over there, laughing?” only to receive the answer, “Ah, that’s the obits desk.”
We do laugh. And it is precisely because obituaries are about the juicy stuff of life that we do not usually mention the dry details about causes of death, unless they are strictly pertinent. When subjects have made a shockingly youthful departure, we will include a brief note to illuminate readers, who are naturally curious to learn what it was that killed a brilliant cellist, for example, just as she was reaching her prime.
Some of our counterparts on American newspapers extend this principle to the very elderly, and insist on noting that the centenarian hero they are obituarising was dispatched by congestive this, or complications of an infectious that. But we assume that our readers, if they feel the need to muse on what has done for a 117-year-old veteran of the silent film era, will assume that he or she has simply succumbed to old age. Or, as I’ve heard it put, “contracted an incurable case of death”. We all catch it in the end.
by Harry de Quetteville, The Telegraph | Read more:
Mask for 'Day of the Dead' (dia de los muertos) in Mexico Photo: Getty images
