It's never too late (3/10/04)

Probably the toughest judgment call in community journalism is the front-page obituary.

Whose death ends up as page one news? Whose is relegated to join the rest of the obits? After all, every death is important. The grief of every survivor matters.

Hard and fast rules are difficult to find, but several things come into play.

The most obvious are the circumstances surrounding the death. Traffic fatalities fall into this category.

But timing is a factor as well.

One local humorist was overheard recently suggesting to a couple of young people that they needed to time their death properly if they wanted to make page one and guarantee a large turnout at the funeral home.

There’s a measure of truth in his wisecrack, though we doubt anyone would opt to shuffle off this mortal coil in the prime of life simply to get a big send-off.

Ultimately, the biggest factor may be something that, for lack of a better word, I’ll call impact. Did a person’s life have great impact on others? And will that person’s death have a measurable impact as well?

Like any subjective standard, impact is tough to measure.

One recent Friday night, for example, I found myself calling a good friend and longtime Methodist to double-check my judgment that the passing of former Asbury pastor Virgil Bjork merited front page coverage.

Rev. Bjork was pastor at Asbury before it was Asbury, back when it was First Methodist, and he was so beloved by his congregation that the shock waves seemed to go on for years after his bishop moved him to a new community. My childhood recollections counted Rev. Bjork as a prominent and pivotal figure in Jay County in the 1950s, but he had been gone for decades and was unknown to many who live here today. My guess was that his impact still resonated in one of the largest congregations in the county, and my Methodist friend assured me that was true.

Some calls, on the other hand, are easy. There was no doubt, for instance, about Ernie Loy’s impact on the community. And the sense of loss that came with his passing could be felt in our own newsroom.

There was loss as well with the death of Dorothy Warner last week.

Though her column had been published in The Commercial Review for years, I don’t think she ever set foot in the CR’s newsroom. Usually, she sent it by mail each week, typed double-spaced with occasional corrections or notes in the margins. When we talked on the phone, she always seemed not quite to believe that we were actually publishing her column; it delighted her that much.

It took a few years to talk her into taking it on.

She’d been writing letters to the editor and had received wonderful feedback from friends and strangers. But a column seemed far too great a challenge when I first suggested it one afternoon at her antique booth at the engine show. Eventually, she relented, insisting that the column be dubbed “At Random” because she wasn’t sure how often she’d submit one for publication.

In the end, of course, the column became a weekly fixture in the paper.

And by writing it, Mrs. Warner accomplished something remarkable. She transformed a very good life into a life which was extraordinary.

Single-handedly, through the impact she had on readers, she moved her obituary onto page one.

And she did that after the age of 70.

That, I’d say to the humorist who suggested dying in your prime to get good ink, is the real lesson to be learned: You’re never too old to accomplish new things. Your life is never so fully formed that you couldn’t have the impact to make your very passing front page news.[[In-content Ad]]