November 24, 2009 Features

Dying to get noticed

The Gazette’s Alan Hustak on the rise and fall of the literary obituary

by Christopher Olson

Obituary writer Alan Hustak is the pen behind the dead PHOTO CLARE RASPOPOW

The newspaper industry is in a sad state when even the obituary pages are dying.

Since Alan Hustak retired last March from his position as The Gazette’s resident writer of obituary pieces after 30 years, the number of Canadians dying in the pages of his former paper has sharply decreased. Its become more reliant on press wires from the United States than the work of its in-house staff.
“If you look at Canwest newspapers,” he said, referring to Canada's largest newspaper owner, “very few Canadians die now, but you’ll have a detailed obituary about the [American] floor salesman who worked at Marlene’s Bargain Basement or a hairdresser for Marilyn Monroe.”
According to Hustak, the state of obituaries today resemble where they were in the early 1980s, when appreciation for the art form was still developing.
“[This] was a period when the obituary writer on a paper was a recycled hack who needed to find something to do, so they shifted him off to do obituaries,” he said. “You didn’t have very much respect in the profession up until about 20 years ago, when baby boomers started getting older and people started [losing their friends and colleagues].”
A newcomer then, Hustak’s career writing the obits was something of an accident.
“I never set out to write an obituary, per se,” he said. “What I write are mini-biographies, and if you’re unfortunate enough to die, it will then become your obituary.”

The dead beat

Hustak got his start when a man approached him with a request to help write his memoirs.
“Suddenly before me was this human documentary,” recalled Hustak, who sat down with the man for a lengthy interview as he sketched out details of his life with crystal clarity.
“Just as I agreed to do this, he died,” said Hustak. “He was 90 after all, but I [then] had all this material.”
Granted, few obit writers have the chance to chat with the deceased, but good obits always include what Hustak calls “a living voice.” The best time to do interviews with the family of the deceased is a few hours after the death of their loved one, said Hustak.
“They still haven’t adjusted to the fact that [they’re] gone and they’re very open and forthright,” he said. “If you call them two days later while they’re planning the funeral, they’ve all become basket cases. They become overly flowery and overly defensive of the dearly departed.”
Hustak argued that paid death notices—which have slowly come to replace literary obituaries in many newspapers—avoid the work of good journalism by handing the reigns of remembrance to those with a vested interest in remembering them in a unanimously positive light.
They’re not that well-written either, he complained.
“They have all kinds of euphemisms for death,” he said. “The funniest one I heard was ‘Matilda so-and-so had her breath sucked out of her.’”
The best expressions are unintentional, he said. Once, when he asked a widow what her husband died of, she replied, “Sclerosis of the liquor.”
“It was just a lovely Freudian slip,” he said. “I mean, who could invent ‘sclerosis of the liquor’?”
Hustak said that some of the best obituaries are about people with whom the writer has some familiarity, but with whom professional distance can still be maintained.
Hustak also counted Joseph-Pierre-Albert Sévigny among his good friends. The former minister in Progressive Conservative John Diefenbaker’s cabinet and Concordia business professor was forced out of government in 1963 after a highly-publicized sex scandal involving a suspected KGB mole.
“Pierre called me up one day and he asked me to write his obituary,” he said.
“He was adamant that the first thing he wanted to be remembered for was as a war hero.”
Knowing full well that his obituary would need to make some reference to the infamous “Munsinger Affair,” Sévigny requested that it be mentioned after, not before, his war hero status.

Drama after death

Sometimes controversy only springs up after someone is gone. Once, Hustak received a call from an illegitimate son who was uncovered after his father’s death. He was the only family member he hadn’t thought to talk to—because no one knew he existed.
Obit writers aren’t immune to creating controversy either. While speaking to the family of a “prominent” Montrealer, Hustak accidentally let it slip to his widow that the deceased’s mother was planning a Roman Catholic funeral for her secular son.
The widow then cremated his corpse—which runs in strict opposition to Catholic doctrine—soon after.
“The world is full of gossips, which is why newspapers survive,” said Hustak. “I would be at the desk and the phone would ring and somebody would say, ‘Have you heard about so-and-so? You better start preparing.’ In some cases they were bang on the money.”

And in some cases, he admits, they weren’t. One of Hustak’s obituaries still hasn’t made it to print after 14 years, but was written because he was told an individual had only one week to live.
“I had lunch with him two weeks ago,” he said.
Writing obituaries far ahead of their deadlines means many of their subjects have an opportunity to read them—not that they have a chance in hell of doing so, said Hustak.
Nick Auf der Maur, a Quebec journalist and politician who passed away in 1998 from cancer, “called me up and said, ‘I want to see my obituary, I want you to bring it to the hospital.’ I said, ‘Nick, you know I can’t do that!”
Hustak includes himself in a slowly-dwindling fraternity of dedicated obit writers, of which he surmises 100 now remain in all of North America.
Although he’s ceased writing for The Gazette, Hustak regularly contributes obits to The Globe and Mail.
With a repository of 100 mini-biographies just waiting to become obituaries the day their recipients expire, Hustak’s byline could outlive his own obituary.
“My theory is that your obituary is the last time you make it into the papers,” he said.