If you like to read obituaries and visit cemeteries, don’t let anyone tell you that it’s a morbid obsession with death. It’s a keen interest in life.
That isn’t to say my day is always brightened by reading about people who have died — there is often sadness and pain for lives cut short — but I like biographies, and each obituary is a biography, although sometimes the stories are to be guessed at between the lines.
In the Victorian era, some newspapers tended to be a bit ghoulish with obituaries, dwelling on morbid details of the cause and manner of death. Today, an obituary usually focuses on a person’s life, rather than how he or she died.
And that’s how it should be — it’s more important to remember how people lived than how they died. That’s one of the reasons I so dislike roadside memorials at the scenes of fatal accidents. They allow the manner in which people die to overshadow how they lived. They don’t tell the real stories.
In the past, published death notices were reserved for the wealthy and well-known, and even today, deaths of the rich and famous get more coverage than those of ordinary people. It’s natural, I suppose — we seem to want to know every detail about how celebrities live and die.
That yen to know might not always be motivated by mourning. As American lawyer and civil libertarian Clarence Darrow said: “I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”
Obituaries now pay tribute to people from all walks of life, and they generally aim to paint a positive portrait. And why not? It’s the rare person who does not have some redeeming feature, some quality, some achievement worth noting. Each person’s story is a thread in the fabric of history, and an obituary helps weave that thread into place.
The biographical data in an obituary are important — names, dates and places — but it’s gratifying when an obituary contains more than that, revealing what the person felt and liked, what mattered.
Some newspapers have the luxury of employing columnists who write more extended obituaries, who make calls and do interviews to add depth and colour to the portrait of the deceased. Those are usually well-read columns, especially as they tend to find extraordinary things about seemingly ordinary people.
Cemeteries, too, tell stories, although there are fewer lines to read between.
The dates alone can tell tales — in cemeteries that have been around for a century or more, you will find an unusual number of deaths in 1918 and 1919.
The Great War took about 16 million lives in the war zones. The great influenza epidemic that began in the latter part of the war and continued past the armistice took 20 million to 40 million lives around the world. Few places were untouched by it. It struck teenagers and young adults particularly hard. Cemeteries help tell that story.
Cemeteries can tell many things. While doing research in 2001 on people significant in Alberta’s history, I found myself wandering around the Royal Oak Burial Park in Saanich. It turns out several people who braved harsh prairie conditions to help shape that province’s development finished out their years on Vancouver Island, including Nellie McClung. Two others were George Exton Lloyd and Charles A. Magrath, men who promoted immigration and development and have Alberta towns named after them.
Enough of those prairie winters, they seemed to say. Let’s go somewhere with a milder climate.
I don’t profess to commune with the dead, but strolling about that beautiful green place on a December day, enjoying the balmy breeze, I seemed to hear someone suggesting there was a better option than the frigid winds blasting across the prairie on the other side of the Rocky Mountains.
It took a while, but I eventually heeded that whispering, and now enjoy living amid all the balminess.
It’s difficult for me to drive past a cemetery, and the older the better. They are not places of the dead, but repositories of countless stories of people who once lived.
As the Old Cemeteries Society of Victoria says about the Ross Bay Cemetery:
“It is like a visit to an outdoor sculpture garden, a walking park and a page from history rolled into one.”
Amen to that.
