WHAT 16 YEARS OF WRITING OBITUARIES TAUGHT ME ABOUT INEQUALITY, AND WAYS TO RESIST

by Kenan Heise

I was the chief writer of obituaries for the Chicago Tribune from 1983, until I retired at the end of 1999. That is, I wrote the long pieces rather than the death announcements.

When I began, there was an unspoken rule that obituaries should be overwhelmingly about men. Women could be included primarily if they had been married to a prominent or wealthy man. This was also the unquestioned policy of other major national newspapers, such as The New York Times, and regional papers.

In fact, it was not only women whose obituaries were not written, it was also people of color and persons of note who were openly gay, lesbian, bisexual or trans. With few exceptions, obituaries were the crowning glory of white men.

There was hope in the 1970s, when it looked as if women would attain equal rights with men in the United States and in Illinois, when the state legislature was considering an amendment to the Constitution, but the Equal Rights Amendment failed to receive enough votes, and the opportunity was lost.

It was a comment in The Reader, that obituaries did not cover women to a significant degree, that nudged me.

I came to realize that I had an opportunity to contribute to the cause of minorities’ and women’s equality shortly after I became the obituary editor for the Chicago Tribune, a position that I did not seek. The Tribune managing editor, Dick Ciccone, made that decision for me. I accepted, but soon handed him a list of requests for me to do the job I thought needed to be done, namely including “more women, characters, street personalities and even children.” I hoped to make the obits more inclusive and more personal.

The next day, Ciccone called me into his office to give me his answer: I could adopt all of these suggestions. And I did, starting immediately.

It was the Tribune, and virtually all other newspapers’ styles, for married women’s obits to read, “Mrs. Paul Jones” rather than “Martha Jones” or “Mrs. Martha Jones,” suggesting that these women lived their lives in the shadow of their husbands, and that shadow obliterated even their name. That changed. Married women were given their own names whether families wished otherwise or not.

Admittedly this was not a game changer, but an important signal that the life of any married woman amounts to more than an extra “s” in her husband’s name.

Kenan Heise

Along my 17-year road of writing obituaries, I gradually and consistently added women and minorities to the obits of those deserving to be written and published, regardless of gender, color, or economic status. I also came to love to do the obituaries of those whose lives were notable or who made contributions to humanity, but who may not have been included before, as long as I had sufficient information to tell their stories with precision. They included colorful characters, offbeat personalities, remarkable street people, and even children. When writing a child’s obituary, I worked hard to make certain it was about that child rather than about the parents, no matter how prominent they might be.

Two years after I started these changes, the Tribune publisher, Clayton Kirkpatrick, stopped by my desk with a group of editors and publishers of a number of major newspapers in the United States. Kirkpatrick told them what a good job I was doing.

I believed that the best way to honor someone in an obituary was to get it right. I used quotations liberally, and thus far, over my years of journalism, no one has told me that I misquoted them.

By violating what many consider a journalistic canon, I found a way to be extraordinarily accurate and factual in the obituaries I wrote: I read the finished obituary back to the family or loved one.

I conclude with the overly kind 1990 comments about my obituary writing by noted newspaper columnist and novelist, Bill Granger:

“Kenan specializes in obituaries, not as the dull, dreaded work assigned to someone on the nightshift because some momentary big shot shuffled off his coil between editions but as lovingly erected milestones marking the end of long and interesting journeys. There are some of us who read a Kenan Heise obit just because his name is bylined, even if we are unacquainted with the honoree. Invariably, we are glad we stopped to read the marker. His elegies, full of country churchyard simplicity, are more remarkable for being etched in a word processor in the hubbub of a big city newsroom.”

Kenan Heise worked for the Chicago Tribune for 36 years, from 1963 to 1999. He was Action Line editor from 1965 to 1983, a Neighborhood Dialogue columnist from 1981 to 1984 and chief obituary writer from 1983 to 1999. Heise was a columnist on Chicago’s Personal History for Chicago Magazine from 1972 to 1974 and is the author of 30 books. He has facilitated interviews by people who are homeless or impoverished, in their own words, for StreetWise Magazine.