The Endgame

Newsletter #65 - Obituaries

Toronto, April 28, 2024

Obituaries

My aged friends and I read the paid obituaries in The Globe and Mail pretty carefully, particularly on Saturdays when the newspaper’s expanded section offers a lively cornucopia of death. Studying obituaries is part of the endgame.

Has anybody we know recently met The Grim Reaper? Oh yes, Percy Bloggs did. Poor devil. Bloggs had an interesting and productive life, although his obituary is a little over the top. He wasn’t that successful. He didn’t get the Order of Canada. The obit was probably written by his adoring spouse who thought him completely wonderful, an opinion not shared by his first two wives. And it’s a good thing the obituary didn’t mention that embarrassing incident thirty years ago that led to his resignation from the bank. What happened could have happened to anybody and misunderstandings like that are best forgotten. Let’s not speak ill of the dead. Mind you, the fact is, not many people liked Percy Bloggs. He won’t be missed much.

The numbers game is an important part of reading the obituaries section. How old were these people who died? Crucially, how many of them were younger than you? One of my friends, who is the same age as I am, routinely calculates the median age of the deceased. If the median age is older than ours, he rings me up with triumph in his voice. “We’ve got a way to go yet!” he says exuberantly. If the median age is younger than ours, I don’t hear from him for days, as he wallows disconsolately, I imagine, in single-malt scotch.

As you read The Globe’s Saturday obituaries, you have to ask yourself: For God’s sake, who were these people? Ordinary Canadians they were not. Almost all the obituants (that is a word) were white. Most were born in Canada or the United Kingdom. Many went to private schools and virtually everybody was a university graduate. Almost all were apparently successful professionals, business executives or government officials. Many were active in their church. Many had cottages or farms. The men loved sailing and fishing. The women spent a lot of time gardening and baking. Everyone liked to travel around all over the place, particularly to Europe. They all lived blameless and prosperous lives and won awards. Whatever this is, it’s not a snapshot of modern Canada.

Most paid obituaries, written by the dead person’s nearest and dearest, are unsatisfying. They offer no context or balance. There had to be more to the lives of these dead people. They must have had defeats as well as victories, tragedies as well as triumphs, failures as well as successes, misery as well as happiness. Trumpeting success and ignoring failure is dehumanizing. Was this a real person? An account of failure and how it was handled tells us more about someone than a catalogue of achievements.

There’s a whole other category of obituaries, written by talented independent journalists, candidly describing notable lives, often with originality and wit. It’s something of an art form. The Globe publishes these regularly (a selection written by Sandra Martin was collected in her 2012 book Working the Dead Beat). The most famous obituaries of this kind have been published for years in the great English and American newspapers. Here’s the opening sentence of the Economist’s December 23, 1999 obituary of God: “When your friends start looking for proofs of your existence, you're heading for trouble. That was God's situation as the millennium got into its stride.”

I’m going to write my own obituary. Winston Churchill said, “"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it." I’m not going to do a Churchill. I’m going to tell the unvarnished truth.

Note to readers

I’m travelling this coming week and so there won’t be an Endgame next Sunday, May 5.