Jane Burns
There I sat one day in June, tools of my reporter’s trade in hand: steno pad, red felt tip marker, a well of curiosity. Ready to listen to someone’s story, just like I’ve done thousands of times over dozens of years.
“This must be the worst interview you’ve ever had,” said the woman who was telling me about her life in the random way most people do — full of tangents and funny anecdotes.
“It’s not an interview,” I say. “Just tell me what has made you happy.”
That was no lie; it wasn’t an interview. I was with my oldest friend in the world beside her bed at Agrace hospice care. I was there not just because I loved my friend and wanted to be with her but because I did, in some ways, have a job to do.
I was there to write her obituary.
This probably seems like an ominous, if not creepy, task to some people. But in the writers’ world in which I exist, many of us have taken this on over the years. And because of the way obituaries have evolved in recent decades, it’s a task that has fallen into the hands of not just a family’s writer but anyone willing or able to do it.
I’ve written my mother’s; I teamed up with my sister to write my father’s. I’ve helped friends write them for parents or grandparents. I wrote one for another of my best friends and was told simply, “Make it sing. And Cher needs to be in there.” It was the best editorial direction I’ve ever been given in my life.
All of this would have been inconceivable to the 21-year-old version of myself who spent weekends as a Des Moines Register intern with the kind of first job many newspaper people once had: writing obituaries. I used to joke to my friends that I hoped I didn’t die on a Saturday because there would be no one to write my obituary.
On those 1980s weekends, funeral home directors would show up with a pack of forms for me with the details I’d use for the obit — date of birth, survivors, when the services were and, rare for a newspaper at the time, cause of death.
The obituary, which was free, was considered a tiny news story and the cause of death was required. If there was a detail that the family wanted (or wanted to avoid) that didn’t follow our form — cause of death, survivors beyond a standard list of spouses and children — they had the option to skip the free option and pay for an obituary. In retrospect, it sounds so very cold.
Because the Register was so strict about including those details, my colleagues and I cringed as we saw other newspapers move away from producing staff-written, fact-filled obituaries to more or less outsourcing them to survivors who wrote whatever they pleased. That’s how most papers approach them now, running obits — free or paid — submitted by a funeral home on behalf of family or friends. And I’ve come to love the evolution that has brought us to contemporary obits. They’re less about the news of a death and more about a person’s life. That’s a beautiful thing.
Obits continued to follow me professionally when I moved to Madison to join the copy desk of The Capital Times when it was a daily print newspaper. We edited the obituaries funeral homes provided, mostly checking for spelling or time/date errors. We smiled as people’s dogs or trucks were listed as survivors and anecdotes detailed lives well-lived. Some of my friends from the just-the-facts world of obits couldn’t believe we published them essentially as-is and merely cleaned them up a little. I thought it was great.
“I don’t care if they write that the person floated up to heaven to polka dance with Jesus,” I’d say. “We just need to make sure they spell Jesus right.”
This summer at Agrace, my friend had no desire to mention polka dancing with Jesus or anything else offbeat. She wasn’t even sure exactly what she wanted beyond me writing it. It was the first thing she said to me when I first saw her at hospice (well, after throwing up her hands and saying, essentially, “What the hell?” which is precisely what one would say when one unexpectedly finds themselves in hospice). It was the first thing her sons asked me, and her stepfather, too. Clearly it weighed heavily on her mind.
Because those closest to her knew how important this was to her, they stayed away one afternoon so we could talk. And we needed to; after high school my friend and I had lost touch and only reconnected in our 40s, so there were gaps to fill. I had enough to build an outline and begin, and asked her if she’d want to read it.
“I don’t know,” she said.
My friend didn’t get the chance. She had a seizure a couple days later and died the next morning. With my red felt tip scribblings from our conversations at Agrace, I sat down at my keyboard to finish the job I’d been given.
It was a challenge to be sure, but more than that it was a privilege. Writing is sort of intangible, not the kind of thing you do for people as a favor — certainly not if you’re a journalist. Yet when it comes time to craft an obituary, writers can do what they do best — tell a story — for someone in their world. A mechanic can fix their kid’s car. An electrician can install their mom’s new ceiling fan. A chef can cook a feast for their friends.
Me? The writer? Online and in print, I got to tell the whole world about my friend since age 5. I got to make it clear how much she was loved. I got to sprinkle in a little mischief. I got to tell the story of how her partner of six years had had a crush on her since we were all in first grade together. I got to use the phrase “cow pie bingo.” I got to call my friend “a beautiful soul.”
I’ll never fix a car or mess with wiring. But I know I’ve gotten to use my skills as a writer to give a final gift to the people I love the most.
And that makes me happy.
Jane Burns is an Isthmus contributor, longtime journalist and freelance writer and editor who works at UW-Madison. She lives on Madison’s west side but hangs out in Mount Horeb a lot.
