A noteworthy headline in a jaded world
Perhaps because social occasions usually feel like a ride in a cart to the guillotine I have developed an odd angle of vision concerning them. I notice, for instance, that the most important people are notable for their absence at funerals, weddings, award ceremonies, etc—mistresses, secret lovers, those who hate us for various reasons, good and bad, lost friends, failed friends. I identify with these people because I’d like to be one of them: absent.
With this angle of vision I guess I was bound to notice that one of our local newspapers, The Independent of Columbia County, New York, has taken to writing obituary headlines profound in their innocence. For example, one recent headline refers to a 94-year-old woman as having “loved the lighthouse,” and another says of a 70-year-old that she loved animals.
The great dailies of our time in their hauteur wouldn’t be caught dead writing such intimate and insightful headlines. What is really important about a person, after all, is what she loved. This elderly woman loved the Hudson-Athens Lighthouse and worked tirelessly to preserve it. And her local newspaper was unafraid to use the word love in a headline. How reassuring in a jaded age!
As a newspaperman it became clear to me over time that we celebrate the wrong people for the wrong reasons. The real heroes are under our noses every day in every town across the land, but we celebrate the gas bags, the obscenely ambitious, the people most successful at picking our pockets and bamboozling us. The heroes are often in the back wards of asylums, in cardboard boxes on the streets, in rest homes, in church soup kitchens.
Our ideas of success are worldly and rancid. So, good for the local newspaper that chooses to celebrate someone’s love.—DM
Hey! Somebody noticed! I take it as a challenge to pluck out the defining tidbit in the obit sent by the funeral home. Sometimes there just isn’t anything and we have to fall back on “Hudson homemaker” or some such. Sometimes, too, I irk survivors (”devoted Elvis fan”; “famous for tortellini”). But not too often. Anyhoo, thanks for the kind words!
When I was a novice reporter I had a rather cavalier
attitude towards obituaries and weddings—until a city
editor told me, This is the last thing anybody is going
to say about a person’s life, so each obit is the most important story you will write that day.—DM