The last words - Shawn Loughlin editorial

Last week, when I updated The Citizen’s website for the week, I noted that we crossed the 800-article mark in the obituaries section of the website.

 

Each one of those entries represents a person and a life lived, so to reach such a milestone is quite staggering when you think about it like that. We don’t allow obituaries to “time out” on our website, so those 800 people have died since we last updated our website platform. (Similarly, we had almost 3,300 articles under our local news heading, which we do time out after one year, so that struck me as an awful lot of writing over a one-year period.)

 

Back to the obituaries, as I said, each entry in our website under that header represents a person’s life. That’s different from the aforementioned local news entries where, yes, some are very important, but others could be described as being a bit fluffier than the norm. To stop and think that we’ve had a hand in publishing the final word on the lives of 803 people (as of this week) in just a few years is both saddening and a huge responsibility.

 

I have heard from many readers that they have a direct connection to the obituaries and will read through them all, every week, regardless of whether they knew the departed or not. A friend from college who gets the paper in Brantford says he always reads the obituaries despite not even having a connection to the community. Reading about people’s lives in this way, he said, is interesting enough.

 

The vast majority of the time, funeral home directors work with families to craft a person’s obituary. They are often rather on the short side, depending on the person, because many newspapers charge to print obituaries, with some charging by the word. We have never charged to run obituaries and that is a policy that Citizen founder Keith Roulston instilled in us as being very important to continue.

 

Big, daily newspapers like The Toronto Star or The New York Times write their own obituaries for celebrities or other high-profile people who pass on, but then also print submitted obituaries as well. Here, we don’t generally write obituaries, but it has happened on occasion when someone has requested help or if one of us had a personal connection to the deceased. 
Notably, I wrote Ernie Phillips’ obituary when he passed away a few years ago. I knew Ernie from interviews we’d done over the years (he spent decades hand-engraving the Stanley Cup when he and his wife Emily lived in Montreal) and we were both members of the Blyth Lions Club. In fact, my membership certificate for the club is one of the last ones that Ernie inscribed for a new club member. 

 

I have also helped with a few others over the years. Neighbour and friend Greg Sarachman comes to mind as well, though his family did such a good job that I barely had anything to contribute.

 

Older, younger, natural causes or tragedy, every one of those 803 obituaries on our website (a list that, unfortunately, yet inevitably, grows week after week) tells the story of someone who walked this earth with us. They were someone’s child, husband or wife, brother or sister, father or mother or grandmother or grandfather. They worked important jobs, they volunteered in their communities, they were local politicians, they had accomplishments that made them proud and they had family members who loved them.

 

Eight hundred is a lot of people when viewed together, but each one is an individual with a story worth telling.