VOICES
Second Time Around
T
hey
say you can't go home again, but last summer I went back
to the place where I grew up as a journalist: The New York Times.
I was at the Times from 1973, when I was hired as a copy boy,
to 1993, when I left to teach journalism fulltime at Columbia.
I started angling to get back to the Times, if only for the summer, soon after I got tenure at the university in 2001. Getting tenure was in some ways a bittersweet moment. While I was delighted with my new status, I realized that I probably would never have a regular newspaper job again. But I wondered: How could I continue to teach journalism without knowing the modern newsroom? I begged and lobbied my old editors and finally was hired as a temporary reporter on the obit desk.
I figured obits was a natural assignment for someone who had been out of the newsroom for nearly a decade. It wasn't like covering city hall or the police department, beats where you needed to develop sources. A prominent person dies and you write the story. Like many other young reporters, I started out writing obits and then did more than a hundred over the course of my newspaper career. A summer doing them sounded just right.
When I returned to the Times in late June, I was amazed by how much had changed. There were new faces, of course, and a few of them were my former students; there was also the Internet, not yet a newsroom fixture when I left; and the printing presses were gone, replaced by satellite transmission to printing plants in Queens, New Jersey, and a dozen locations around the nation.
But I soon realized that the biggest change had taken place within me. "Hello Mrs. Klein," I'd say into the telephone. "I am calling from The New York Times to write an obituary of your father. First, let me express my sincere condolences."
At first I didn't even realize what I was doing. It just seemed like the natural thing to say. But then one day, the Times obituary writer who sat to my right commented: "Condolences? Ari, you've established a new standard."
"Do you think it's wrong?"
"Actually, it's quite charming. I just never thought of it."
As a young reporter, I had never thought of it, either. I probably mumbled something like, "I'm sorry to bother you at a time like this," but I didn't really mean it. I was actually happy that I reached someone. The purpose of the call was not to console but to get information, finish the story, and have another byline. But one other thing had happened in the nine years since I had left the Times: I lost both my parents. My mother died in 1995 and my father in 1999. Writing an obituary no longer seemed like a professional exercise; it was an avenue of empathy.
I found myself staying on the phone longer, talking to widows and orphans about loved ones. My editor, Chuck Strum, kept reminding me that we were writing obituaries, not tributes or eulogies, but I couldn't help but ask about relationships and legacies.
There was the evangelist who started a special Christian ministry to men because of his difficult relationship with his own father. The evangelist's son, also a minister, told me about that.
The daughter of a political prisoner told me about the shame of growing up with her father in jail and about the joy of his release through an unusual presidential pardon.
The niece of a Big Bands crooner told me that her uncle — who spent his career on the road — became a volunteer firefighter in his retirement. "He was so happy to be in one place," she said.
The daughter of a record company executive who grew up with all kinds of musicians in her home told me how she ended up marrying a rock drummer — and later divorced him.
Most of what I learned was not relevant to the obits, but sometimes I would find a nugget that I could include, if only in the list of the survivors, e.g., "his son, Jonathan, is a death-row criminal defense lawyer in Los Angeles."
As I worked, I thought often of my own parents and how bereft and sad I felt in the days after their deaths. Like other mourners, I had a need to talk and assess their lives. Now I was there for others. I was part journalist, part pastor. But in the end, I think my ability to empathize made my obits sharper and more insightful.
I came to realize that, like youth, obit writing is all too often wasted on the young.
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