Till Death Do Us Part
September 17, 2012
ALEXANDRA writes:
After enjoying your blog for some time and learning a great deal from you and your readers and commenters, I am pleased to have relevant experience to share with regard to the recent entry on divorced spouses in the obituaries. I worked at a daily newspaper in a medium-sized city (population 175,000) for five years. During most of that time, I worked the obituary desk.
About a quarter of the time, a family member would prepare something. In those cases, I edited it for AP style and glaring grammatical errors but otherwise left their prose alone. These cases tended to be very circumspect about broken marriages, leaving out the first spouse entirely. Particularly in the cases of men who had children with all their wives, this resulted in the appearance of much larger families than in fact existed — one wife’s name and five or more children.
The rest of the time, the funeral director would have the family fill out an information sheet with dates, names, career, military service, and other relevant information. I would prepare the obituary using this information and send it to the funeral director, who would secure the family’s approval before publication. During my first year of doing this work, I learned how to handle these cases with finesse. You see, despite the overwhelming social acceptance of divorce, families were often very skittish about the words “first husband” or “first wife.” They preferred such painful constructions as “…survived by his children, John, Jane, Joe, and Jill; the mother of his children, Sally…” or “his children and their mother….”
A small nit but an important one on your heading for this entry. The phrase was a compromise between the Puritan and catholic [sic] wings of the Anglican church, a matter of language but also some theological import. It is backward from that commonly misquoted, here as found in the Book of Common Prayer:
Then shall they loose their hands; and the Woman, with her right hand taking the Man by his right hand, shall likewise say after the Minister,
N. take thee N. to my wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and to obey, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance; and thereto I give thee my troth.
Mrs. H. writes:
We recently experienced the awkwardness of my husband’s deceased grandma being left out of her husband’s obituary. He had remarried and his widow left out his previous wife, even though there was no divorce, adultery, or cohabitation. We can only think she wanted to pretend she had always been married to him, and he hadn’t had a previous wife. (Or perhaps that she had always been married to him, and hadn’t had previous husband(s) of her own. We don’t know a whole lot about her previous marriage(s), or how many there were, or even how many children she has.)
Laura C. writes:
What a terrible thing to consider! My grandfather remarried a number of years after his wife (and mother to his 8 children) passed away. Never in a million years would his second wife have dreamed to leave his first wife out of his obituary, but more importantly, it was one of his children that wrote it (my mother, in fact). How else would all the details be accurate? She wasn’t there for most of his life, though she was a lovely woman (she passed on a year or so later). The complications that come with divorce and otherwise broken families are probably innumerable, but this is one I hadn’t even considered.
But I guess, in the scheme of pursuing ultimate haaaaaaappiness, what does a little fibbing in the obituary matter if it avoids making someone sound less faithful or wise?
Thank you for this interesting piece of information, it has been excellent food for thought.
