Why do obituaries not tell why a person died?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I write obituaries in my local paper. Or rather, I write news obituaries.

You have to understand something about the news industry - it’s entirely ad-supported. A lot of newspapers have gotten rid of news obituaries (death notices) entirely.

Memorial obituaries are written entirely by the family, and the family purchases ad space (usually at a discounted price, but not always) to run the obituary. Memorial obits are a celebration of life, and serve to commemorate the lives of the loved one who has passed on.

Death notices serve an entirely different purpose - they are there to notify the community that the person has died, and when their services and visitation are. That’s it. They tend to be very impersonal and written in whatever style the newspaper writes in, because they’re written by a clerk or a rookie reporter.

In both cases, however, you’re going to have the family intervening. Most newspapers nowadays only need the funeral home contact information so that they can confirm that the person has, indeed, died (I get a LOT of fake obits submitted here - people think it’s a hilarious joke to place a fake obituary for their friend down at the bar for his birthday) - cause of death isn’t necessary.

Newspapers don’t go out and seek obituaries, as some people seem to think. Newspapers take obituaries that are submitted to them - and not every family wants an obituary. So newspapers have to take what they get from the survivors when it comes to writing an obituary - it’s not like the deceased can do it for themselves.

Nine times out of ten, not listing the cause of death is because of family intervention. The other time it’s because the cause of death is not considered appropriate to list (for instance, the above where grandpa died in a whorehouse - although here that probably wouldn’t be as big a deal, as we have legalized prostitution).

~Tasha

22

Really? Because dozens of young people that I grew up with have died, and almost every single one of them was a car wreck, with 2 or 3 shootings thrown in. You don’t slowly car wreck yourself to death.

23

This is how my newspaper got obits in my copy editor days. The funeral homes would submit the completed forms, and our clerks would type them up – except on the weekends, when the copy desk handled them. I once had to type up an obit for a 2-month-old baby. IIRC, the cause of death wasn’t given. Not a fun way to start the day.

24

Yes and no, depending …

At one time, obituaries were actually newspaper stories, usually written by a specialist who had mastered the lingo and knew how to get the message across without undue harshness. Victims of cancer and other long-term illnesses usually died “after a lengthy illness” or, when the C-word became sayable in polite society, “after a long bout with cancer” or whatever. Suicide, accident and murder victims “died unexpectedly” or, in the more lurid papers, “died tragically”. Their deaths were almost always covered elsewhere in the paper because of the circumstances. The information almost always came from the funeral home handling the body, and families never had to be bothered with talking to the local paper.

Over time, however, obit writing lost its specialty, and began to be handed off to cub reporters or other inexperienced writers, and was seen as a “training ground” for accuracy and detail. Unfortunately, this led to errors that often offended the decedent’s family. The logical fix was a “form” for funeral homes to fill out. Problem was, the form didn’t always address every situation. As traditional families became less traditional, yet somehow needed to maintain the pretense of tradition, it became harder and harder to sensitively address all of the permutations of a family (one woman who died here in my hometown while I was editor of the local paper had divorced and remarried, and had children by both husbands – she ended up with two obituaries, and if you didn’t know the families, you wouldn’t have believed it was the same person in both obits!) At the same time, newspapers began to shorten obits to save on the spiraling costs of ink and newswprint, and several other factors came into play: Increased sensitivity to privacy, increases in suicide rates (small, but important); increased demands by families to portray the decedent in a favorable light, and so on. All of these served to force the “cause of death” out of the obituary.

Today, most newspapers offer a “death notice” paid for by the funeral home (considered advertising, by the way, not news) and either a free obit, short to the point of terseness, written by the newspaper staff, or a “paid memorial” in which the family is allowed to print pretty much whatever they want.

Incidentally, I have followed the age-old practice of keeping my own obituary updated, and have secured the promise of the local editor that it will be published exactly as written. He promises this because it is a warts-and-all accounting of my life, and contains a notice to the public: This is how an obituary should be written. Just my one last shot at pretentiousness.

25

The oddest one I’ve seen was for a girl I went to high school with. The tiny local newspaper (Geneseo, IL, if you’re interested) listed her death as “victim of predatory homicide.” I don’t know the details, but apparently she was found brutally murdered in a hotel room somewhere in California. I was surprised they put in the part that she was murdered in the obit.

26

Leaving off the cause of death is an old usage, where it was considered improper to mention it. Newspapers had code: “A long illness” usually meant cancer, while “a brief illness” usually meant a heart attack.

It may have had roots when people were more likely to die of contagious diseases and the family didn’t want people to think they might be infected. However, nowadays people are more forthright and are more willing to name the actual cause, but there are still some who think the cause of death is nobody’s business.

27

I think sometimes - especially in the case of suicide - the families are uncomfortable about all the details being shared publicly. Our local paper rarely does obits, but they do run death notices. I remember when a FOAF committed suicide (wrote a suicide note, locked her small children in the house, went out to the shed, took a gun, loaded it, wedged it in under her arm and shot herself in the chest), the death notices listed by friends and other family members all said the usual “died tragically” and “died suddenly”, but the notice her parents placed said “result of an accident”.

28

In Spain (not-news) obits are extremely uncommon, you just get the death notice. It does not normally list cause of death; some families insist in adding it and then it’s listed.

Mom once remarked on seeing one for a guy she knew to be not just an atheist but anti-theist and anti-Church which included the usual line “comforted by the last sacraments and having received the Pope’s blessing”. She wasn’t sure whether to find it funny or sad but figured that, if there does be a God and that guy has seen his notice, he’d probably be angry about it.