A couple of weeks ago a reader wrote to say that he was “uplifted” by an obituary we had published. He said he would like to read more about the life of the man who had died and who he wished he had known. This week, perhaps in response, Sal Del Deo offers his own further commentary about that man, fisherman, chef, and carpenter John O. Browne, who Sal said, in Tom Recchio’s Aug. 29 obituary, “personified all the things I found so precious about Provincetown.”
People sometimes tell us they’re surprised to find that obituaries offer a kind of solace that shapes our sense of community. “Is it wrong that I come away from reading the obituaries smiling?” asked Mary Moniz in a letter to the editor. She liked the chance to learn more about the lives of people she’d greeted at the hardware store.
Still, we frequently deal with family members who say they want nothing at all to appear in the paper about their relatives who have died. This puts us in a difficult spot.
Tom wrote about this problem in a 2022 essay, “The Singularity of Lives.” He noted one reason that people often give for nixing an obituary: “She was a very private person.” He argued that the lives even of very private people are part of the public record and deserve to be documented. A community newspaper has a responsibility to do that, he wrote.
That’s why he takes the time to interview the family members and friends of those who have died. Those conversations don’t always go according to plan. A few weeks ago, we received a draft obituary for a longtime local resident, and we added more details that were collected in a long interview with a sibling of the deceased. But a different sibling strongly objected to the added facts and anecdotes and insisted that there must be no obituary at all. (We published a shortened version as a compromise.)
Researching and writing obituaries, it turns out, can land you squarely in the middle of complicated family histories.
With the continued proliferation of AI-generated online scams desecrating the memory of those who have died (see “Google Chooses Evil”), there’s another reason why telling the true stories of our neighbors’ lives on the obituary pages is important. The quest for “privacy” is doomed to failure.
Writing in the Boston Globe this week, Erik Frid describes how his brother’s death this year from liver failure was exploited by scammers who created fake obituaries using artificial intelligence, which Google had duly surrounded with clickbait advertising. There was nothing his family could do to stop it.
But they did go ahead and write an obituary for his brother, one that “serves as a record of his life and pays service to who he was as a person.” We, too, want to honor our dead by putting their true stories, as complete and honest as we can make them, out into the world.
