Documenting Death: Obituaries in the Time of Coronavirus
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, The New York Times painstakingly collected its “Portraits of Grief” over a year and a half, creating a detailed mosaic of the lives lost in the attacks in New York, Washington, DC and Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
Now, as the novel coronavirus pandemic rages globally, the documentation of lives lived and lost has changed.
“Today, everyone is an obituary writer,” said Ari Goldman, a former 20-year staff writer at the Times, who is now a tenured professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. “Whether you cover fashion or business or the arts, you’re gonna have to write an obituary.”
Goldman, who has taught a seminar on covering religion for many years at Columbia and still contributes to the Times, spoke about the delicate work of reporting and writing obituaries in a webinar hosted by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, also based at Columbia Journalism School.
Bruce Shapiro, executive director of the Dart Center, led the conversation, noting that the scale and nature of the COVID-19 pandemic has put reporting on death in a new framework.
“Obituaries have been central to journalism for forever,” Shapiro said. “That in itself is challenged right now.”
Underscoring the unprecedented size and proximity of the pathogen’s impact, Goldman noted that he was speaking from a location close to Mount Sinai Morningside Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
“You may hear sirens as we spend this hour together,” he said.
On Tuesday, New York City announced it would count “probable” coronavirus deaths along with confirmed cases, raising its death toll past 10,000 and accounting for nearly 40 percent of total COVID-19 deaths in the United States. Goldman showed three pages of obituaries in Sunday’s edition of the Times.
“For a single person to die in an accident is a tragedy,” Goldman said. “When you’re part of a bigger community that’s suffering…there’s a greater understanding that you’re not alone in this.”
As part of its overall coverage, the Times is reporting on the lives of ordinary people who died from COVID-19, not just public figures. The obituaries are unrelated to each other beyond the cause of death, an approach Goldman says is key.
“Obituaries are not about death,” he said. “You’re writing about life. One little fact in it is that this person passed away. If it’s about death, then this is a news story.”
Goldman, who also teaches a course at Columbia called “The Journalism of Death and Dying,” in which students learn to cover death and trauma, said journalists’ most important skill in these times is called empathetic objectivity.
When calling family members, Goldman said he always began by expressing his condolences.
“A colleague asked me ‘is that okay?’” he said, adding that journalists are human beings first.
“We have to extend ourselves and show compassion,” he said.
Goldman’s experience covering religion gave him further insight on covering grief. He said every culture and tradition mourns uniquely, which means reporters need to approach every situation with compassion and nuance, noticing the details.
“The one thing everyone has in common is a candle,” he said. “Everyone lights a candle.”
Reporters all over the world are adapting to new beats in real time. By the end of the year, many journalists will have experience writing obituaries, a grim reminder of the scale of the virus. Goldman said reporters will have to ignore some of the news habits they’ve learned in order to write good obituaries.
“We tend to write what’s newsy, what’s recent,” he said. “In an obituary, you have to put in some things you may not care about… We don’t have to bend the rules of objectivity, but the most important thing is empathy.”
Journalists from Ethiopia, India and Spain joined the conversation. One listener asked how reporters should approach verification of facts provided by family members.
“Take nothing as gospel truth,” Goldman said, “except maybe their address and age.” He cited a colleague at the Times who would call colleges to confirm the deceased received a degree.
“That’s a luxury that not a lot of news organizations have,” he added. “To the extent you can, verify, and to the extent you can, attribute.”
He emphasized that obituaries are still an exercise in reporting.
An obituary is not a eulogy, Goldman said.
“You’re not writing a tribute to a person,” he said. “We have to fall on that journalistic dictum of ‘Don’t tell me, show me.’ ”
The Dart Center holds weekly webinars on COVID-19 with journalists.
