NECROLOGIES AND EMPATHY | Sector M

Here is a fact on yours that you may not know: my writer career started in a metropolitan newspaper … as a necrological writer. I was 18, starting just at university and I was recruited by the instructor of my mass communication course.

I stayed at this work for more than three years while I was going to school. Once I graduated, I went to the world of marketing and advertising, where I was largely stayed. Well, during my day work recently, I wrote a necrology for a deceased previous employee. For a while, I dusted this set of skills from the place where I started as a writer. It was a sad duty, but I accepted, for reasons that I will enter this post later.

Although everything is in my mind, I wanted to put in words some of the things I learned in this early role, why I finally left it, and why I think that necrologies and funerals, in general, are important.

Life and death in the Obit department

For the most part, I was only a writer at an office, working on a computer like everyone else, but there were additional elements that made the work emotionally difficult. We had a random number of necrologies that would come every day, and this work taught me about deadlines. Do everything you need to do, just make sure your copy is in 3:00.

We verify all the elements of a necrology with the funeral lounge, often just the spelling of a name that looked at, or a birthday if that listed on the admission form did not correspond, things like that. Most of the time, we simply called the funeral show and let’s talk to one of their representatives, but sometimes we had to contact the family.

Understand that these are people who had lost a loved one per day or two before this call, or even This same day. They were often confused, angry and always tried to unfold their heads, so we had to be very soft with them. While we had to remain professional, everyone understood that a dose of empathy and understanding could go very far.

The most heartbreaking part was perhaps when they show up at the office to deliver a photo of their beloved. They could even look good and composed when they crossed the door. It was the moment they put the photo that they almost always started to cry. This act was what put their sorrow in the foreground for them. This made the loss real. We had a special side part with a box of fabrics and two chairs to give them space to compose. I had to see this scene playing dozens of times during my mandate there.

It was not so bad, however. Because we have treated dozens of names a day, there were times when we started to see the emerging trends in the birth of a person and the theme of his name. For example, between 1908 in the early 1920s, he became popular to name girls after precious stones. Pearl, emerald, opal, etc. My great-grandmother, born in 1911, was named Ruby.

We also determined that the average age of incoming outbursts was around 77 years, which was biased from time to time by a younger person, generally a teenager, who is tragically dead in a car wreck or a similar accident.

Of course, there were exceptions.

Why I stopped

A large part of what I learned about journalism at the time led to the house at the idea of professional detachmentto learn and report the facts without getting close to it too close that it could harm your objectivity. It was not always easy when you are dealing with daily mourning families. Even when they sometimes called the office and shouted and shouted at us for doing something wrong (whether it was really bad or not), I knew it was just their grief. I still had a job to do, and I could not be too wrapped in one case, otherwise I could simply not work in this space.

As they say, It had to happen, and one day it is. I received a necrology for an eight -year -old boy. Whenever I received an obit in my queue which was at a figure, it justified a second look, just to make sure that neither the family nor the funeral show had left a figure aside.

This one came with the photo, a portrait of Olan Mills of the child. And let me tell you that this photo was so good that it looked like the one that could have come with a virgin wallet or photo frame. He had a big smile on his face as if he were about to burst while laughing, a smile that was reflected in his eyes. He just look so full of life. I was immediately saddened just when I saw this boy who should have been alive, but that was not the case. My professional detachment has taken up a major success. Throughout the day, I was haunted by the thought of this boy. Often, the cause of death was not reported to us, so I never discovered what had taken it.

While I worked through this NECRology, I found that there was a certain inconsistency in the information provided. For the life of me, I do not remember what it was, perhaps the name of a family member who looked badly spelling or a gap between the day of the week for the services and the day of the month. I called the funeral home, but no one has happened again. The standard procedure was then to call the family. This boy had lived with his family in Alaska, so I composed the number.

Long ago, people still had answers. Well, guess who the voice greeted me, inviting me to leave my name and my number after the beep? I sat there at my office, looking at his photo while this boy’s voice spoke to me on the phone, and his voice Exactly corresponded to his photo. My detachment broke at that time. I don’t remember now if I even left a message. I probably did it, but it was suddenly my turn to use the side part to try to compose me.

I have never watched the work the same way again. Sometimes, in the bustle to respect the deadlines, names and dates and associations all scrambled together. Sometimes you have stopped seeing them as people and considering them as line articles on a list, as tasks that had to be finished. This little boy stopped me in my footsteps, reminding me of a clear reminder that each name was attached to a family that was the morning of their loss. But how could something that simple encapsulate the fullness and shade of someone’s life? The truth was that she couldn’t.

This would not be the case.

He shouldn’t.

I drink in this work for a few more months, but I knew I was finished. I went to work for a local phone company, and although there were some opportunities for me to return to the Obit Department along the way, I never did.

Why are they important

NECROLOGIES can be a defective and limited way to mark the death of someone, but time and reflection have changed my attitudes towards them. The same goes for funerals and commemorative services. These are sad affairs, of course, but they help us to supervise the loss in our minds when everything seems in chaos. They are a necessary step to help us cry and start to heal.

When I said earlier that I hadn’t written necrology for a while, it was not precisely true. What I meant was a official ONCROLOGY, one where I did not personally know the individual. The fact is that I wrote necrologies of a kind here on this blog, although they are far from what I did in the newspaper. In these, my detachment was completely out of the airlock, and rightly so. They were people I loved, that I always Love, whose loss devastated me, and I always fight with their loss. (You can find them here, here and here.)

NECROLOGIES, like funerals, are for the living. Although they can help us come back to the proverbial horse, they have another function, which I think is the most important: This is how we remember it. When someone left, it is one of the greatest honors that a human can do for another – simply to remember with emotion.

A note on empathy

Of course, I couldn’t let a heavy subject pass like this without a kind of geek reference, so here it is. In The Lord of the RingsGandalf was a angelic being known as a Maier. Other powerful personalities in history, such as Saruman and Sauron, were part of this same group. Each of the Maier were at some point learning of one of the valarMuch more powerful beings that were actually gods. In the case of Gandalf, he had served Nienna, the vala whose portfolio was sorrow and sadness. She continuously cried for all the pain in Arda, even for things that had not yet come. It is believed that the reason why Gandalf understood so well empathy and pity was because of this affiliation.

In this spirit, I am a great supporter of the adage that we must always be nice to people because we never know what war they are fighting secretly which we know nothing. Our friends, our family, our colleagues can go through seriously emotional stuff, and we may never know. Maybe a little kindness on your part is what helps someone who has trouble spending their day. Having been in various states of mourning for more than a year now, I know that it is true.

Yes, it is easy to be cynical on this subject, especially with everything that is happening around us, and it seems that it is everyone for themselves. I noticed a quote from Elon Musk that floated on Twitter these days. There are a few variations, but they come down to this: all more or less:

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

I’m not sure I can disagree with this statement more. I think it’s a lack of empathy which is the deep cause of a large part of our sufferings and the overwhelming majority of our problems. Our worst vices, our inhumanity towards each other, all arise from a lack of empathy. So, in a world where we could choose to have more or less, I would choose more each time.

I think that is what makes us fundamentally human.

Thank you for reading.