The Art of the Obit by Sandra Martin

Author:Sandra Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2014-04-07T20:52:14+00:00

Chapter 3

Obituaries as Entertainment and the Rise of Dead-Beat Groupies

I used to be stunned when grieving friends and family were outraged that I would write about the peccadilloes as well as the triumphs of their loved ones. Over the years I came to realize that blaming me, the messenger, was really an indication of their mixed emotions about the departed. They couldn’t get mad at their loved one for having the effrontery to die or for exhibiting embarrassing character traits, so they transferred their anger to me instead.

Not everybody is a hero. Eccentricity courses like a river through the lives of many of the people I have written about. Among those who have left their mark on Canadian society, I’ve chronicled a hapless spy, a self-promoting saxophonist, an ingenious crook whose disguises duped police on both sides of the border, an inspired graphic designer who was felled by his addiction to cocaine, the establishment scourge and author of Canada’s first significant gay novel, and the inventor of Trivial Pursuit, one of the most successful board games of all time. Some, such as actor Jackie Burroughs, poet Irving Layton, and singer Denny Doherty, had talents that will guarantee their cultural legacies, but all of them will be remembered as characters who lived at full tilt, whatever the consequences.

In October 2008 I wrote the obituary of Connie Rooke, a woman I had known and admired. She was a friend, but that is not why I wrote about her.

She was a well-published literary critic, a former editor of the Malahat Review, a co-founder of the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival, a former president of the University of Winnipeg, and a champion of Canadian writers and writing — among other coups she was the first person to publish short stories by Yann Martel and Rohinton Mistry. She also had a dramatic life, as the wife of writer Leon Rooke and as a well-connected literary force. On top of all of that, she turned her own dying into a “best practices” lesson about how to grab hold of every moment that remained.

There’s nothing uplifting about a terminal cancer diagnosis. For most people it is the beginning of an increasingly solitary journey into the unknown. But Rooke approached her own death at sixty-five with an openness (which included railing against the fading light) and an intellectual curiosity. Her hospital bed — set up in a bright, sunny room in the front of her downtown Toronto house with an “Obama for President” poster on the footboard — became a salon where family, friends, neighbours, and colleagues gathered to gossip, debate, and share the company of an always stimulating and generous woman.

Some of Rooke’s friends wanted me to ignore her blustery tenure at the University of Winnipeg, which ended abruptly when in 2002 the Board of Regents bought out the remaining two years of her contract. That was impossible, for it was on the public record. Even more contentious, apparently, was a rupture in her long marriage. That too

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