Working the Dead Beat Read Online Free PDF Page B

so. He was an actor, after all, and it is my experience that people forget about the tape recorder and the camera if the conversation is engaging.
    Nothing is completely dispassionate in this world, but the process in which I, the journalist, interview and write an obituary of a significant Canadian figure comes closer to the ideal of objectivity than eulogies and tributes from family and friends that appear in print and on the Web.
    Myth Number Five: Obituaries Don’t Tell
the Real Truth
    SOMEBODY ASKED ME while I was in the final stages of writing this book if I had thought about including Clifford Olson, the murderer who abducted, tortured, and killed eleven children in British Columbia in a heinous nine-­month rampage in the early 1980s. Yes, I replied, but I couldn’t because he died in September 2011, which was outside my time frame of the first decade of this century.
    There was nothing good to say about Olson the habitual criminal, his revolting “cash for bodies” deal with authorities so families could recover the remains of their murdered children, or his prison-cell antics to negotiate a new trial, parole, and other concessions. But his diabolical behaviour both in and outside prison changed the justice system in Canada. Measures that we take for granted nowadays, such as victim impact statements at sentencing and parole board hearings, were nonexistent back then. Amber Alerts, the National Missing Children’s Registry, and amendments to strengthen the Criminal Code with respect to sexual assault, child abduction, and sexual abuse have also become standard. Many of those changes came about because the families of Olson’s victims, outraged and traumatized by the treatment they endured during his prosecution and incessant jailhouse appeals, petitioned and lobbied the justice system on behalf of their murdered children. That’s why Olson’s worth writing about.
    â€œNever speak ill of the dead” is an aphorism attributed to Chilon of Sparta, a sixth-century BCE Greek sage and civic leader who is said to have encouraged the rise of militarism in Sparta. Essentially he was saying that the dead can no longer harm the living or defend themselves against criticism, so it is better to ignore their faults and remember their virtues. That is a fine sentiment, especially as proclaimed by a politician eager to ensure his own legacy, but it doesn’t apply to obituary writers. We stand apart from the family and friends of the deceased because we are journalists, not eulogists.
    In my view there is no such thing as an uninteresting life, but there are plenty of badly researched and written accounts. The difference between humdrum and compelling rests in documenting weaknesses, celebrating strengths, and placing people’s lives in the context of what else was happening here and abroad. (“Did they serve in the Second World War?” is a question I always ask when I look at the resumés of people born in the early decades of the twentieth century. If yes, where? If not, why? I’m not interested in ridiculing decisions made long ago but rather in seeking an understanding of how a pivotal event of the past century affected my subject.) My goal is to make my subjects breathe one more time on the page, and that means a portrait that includes shadow as well as light, or “warts and all,” as Oliver Cromwell allegedly said to court painter Sir Peter Lely back in the seventeenth century.
    Nevertheless, writing about the dead means observing and sometimes even sharing the grief of those they have left to mourn, as the euphemism has it. “Dead people can’t sue” may be a legal truism in most jurisdictions, but that doesn’t mean the departed and their survivors don’t deserve respect. An obituary writer often dwells in the slippery territory between the blunt truth and the subtle reference. Nothing is omitted, but unflattering traits aren’t