August 20, 2024 | Hosted by Leanne Kaufman
Tell the story of how you lived and want to be remembered by writing your own obituary
“Write what you want said about yourself, leave out the parts you don't want. You're not a journalist, right? This is about you. So leave out that stuff and put in what you want and how you want to be remembered.”
Intro Speaker:
Hello, and welcome to Matters Beyond Wealth with your host, Leanne Kaufman, president and CEO of RBC Royal Trust. For most of us, talking about subjects like aging, late life, and estate planning isn’t easy. That’s why we’re going to help get the conversation started on this podcast while benefiting from the insights and expertise of some of the country’s top experts. We want to bring you information today that will help to protect you and your family in the future. Now, here’s your host, Leanne.
Leanne Kaufman:
How does your body chemistry react when I say the word, obituary? The immediate association is probably with death and all the emotional trappings that come with the word. But what if we changed our perception to think the opposite? Obituaries are actually about life—lives well lived. They are a story about how one lived, and often how one wants to be remembered. Instead of dreading planning for end of life, what if we could reframe the conversation as an opportunity to reflect on our legacy? Let’s actually talk about writing and planning our last chapter.
Hello, I’m Leanne Kaufman, and welcome to RBC Wealth Management Canada’s Matters Beyond Wealth. With me today is Sandra Martin, an award-winning journalist, columnist, and now a contributing writer for The Globe and Mail. As a longtime obituary writer, she has written the lives of hundreds of significant Canadians, including Pierre Berton, Jackie Burroughs, Brian Mulroney, and Alice Munro. She’s also the author of the critically acclaimed national bestsellers, Working the Dead Beat and A Good Death: Making the Most of Our Final Choices.
Sandra, thanks for being here with me today to discuss the importance of planning for your end of life and why this matters beyond wealth.
Sandra Martin:
I’m happy to be here.
So, you distinguish between an obituary and a death notice. Can you tell us what distinction you make there?
Yes. I think an obituary is written by a journalist so that it is reported, and it is both the shadow and the light in a life. It is supposedly dispassionate, but of course, these things do often get emotional.
A death notice, on the other hand, is an announcement. It is what a family or good friends want to put in, say a newspaper, or on social media to announce the death of a loved one, or in some cases, not such a loved one.
So they have different purposes. I’m not writing for the family as a journalist, I’m writing for the public. I’m writing for the readers of, in this newspaper I mostly worked for, which was The Globe and Mail. Whereas a death notice is often written to just let people know and to pay tribute to the person who’s died.
Let’s go deeper then into the purpose of an obituary and maybe what makes a good one given the definition you’ve given us now.
Well, one of the things about obituaries is that they’re often written in a very big hurry. Now, I recently wrote about Brian Mulroney, for example. I wrote it for The Guardian in England. I had thought about writing his obituary years and years ago when he was sick with some sort of ailment, and I thought, “If he lives long enough, he is going to get over the shame that he had experienced when he left politics and he’s going to be considered a hero.” And in fact, he did. There were many, many reasons to applaud Brian Mulroney. His stance on acid rain, introduction of the GST, all sorts of things like that. But there were other things. There were those brown envelopes of cash that he accepted after he left office.
What I wanted to do was to try and account for all of those things, all those contradictions in his life. So when The Guardian asked me to write his obituary, that’s what I tried to do. I went back into his early life and I looked up the time when he grew up in a small town in Quebec, and it was a pulp and paper town. His father had said to him at some point, “The only way out of a pulp and paper town is a university education.” So even though the family was poor, they really strived to get him an education.
But another thing that happened was Brian Mulroney had a really beautiful voice. So, he would sing when mega barons would come in from the United States, the ones who owned the town basically, and he would sing. Then at one point, he was given money. And I think that need to be acknowledged and to receive recompense for whatever he was doing was something important to him throughout his life. And that I thought probably accounted a little bit for his acceptance of the money from Karlheinz Schreiber.
So I wanted to include all that in the obituary. Now, the tributes I read to Brian Mulroney did not include the name Karlheinz Schreiber because they had a different purpose. So I think that’s really the difference.
When you say that it’s written by a journalist, what I’m learning from you is what’s the independent point of view on this as opposed to having a particular slant on the story of the life of the deceased?
It is an independent point of view, and it’s also one that I hope is empathetic to the suffering of the immediate family and friends. Talking with someone about the death of a loved one is a very poignant conversation, and I’ve done many, many of them. And they’re usually done on the telephone, and they’re usually done in a hurry. So, I think it’s important to make sure that you empathize with the family with the loss the family is experiencing, but also what you’re doing is you’re a journalist, you’re not doing a tribute. You’re trying to account for a life in all its complexities, the good and the bad, and to try to draw some conclusions about that life.
Now, for example, I just wrote about Alice Munro, a beloved short story writer. And because I am not the official obituary writer for The Globe and Mail anymore, I have some choice in these matters, it’s not my job to write this. So I said, “No, I didn’t want to write the obituary, and what I would prefer to do was write an appreciation.” So that was a much different kind of thing. What I was able to do was to use her life to describe her stories and use her stories to comment on her life rather than having to go through the chronology of the life. So it gave me a bit more freedom to write what I wanted to write about her.
Now, you’ve actually recommended that people consider writing their own obituary and include it in their Will. Why do you recommend that?
Because it’s very troubling for people. Let’s say your mother’s just died, and you have to put a death announcement in the paper. What are you going to say about your mother? It’s so complicated. And when did she graduate from high school? Did she graduate? When did she marry? There are all these things, and I know that from having talked with people. When I say to people, “So when did your father meet your mother?” “Oh, I don’t know.”
So I think that it’s far more sensible for you to take on this task yourself. Write what you want said about yourself, leave out the parts you don’t want. You’re not a journalist, right? This is about you. So leave out that stuff and put in what you want and how you want to be remembered.
I think also that if you’re writing your own obituary, you certainly should be talking about what you think your life was all about, which is a very hard thing to do. But I also think that it’s not necessarily a time to settle scores.
You say that as if you’ve seen something like that in the past.
I’ve seen lots of things like that. I’ve seen obituaries—because I love reading the death notices. I’m addicted to it, I have to confess. So, where the second wife writes the death notice and there’s no mention of the first wife who is the mother of the children. I remember writing my father’s death notice, and I managed to get in two dearly beloved wives. And I think that’s important, but I wasn’t writing as a journalist. I was writing as the daughter of the person who was deceased.
So, you’re doing your loved ones a bit of a favour if you do this as part of your planning so that they don’t have to do the excavation of all the facts in order to get them right. But then also you are truly the author of your own final chapter, I guess, if you’re writing it yourself.
That’s right. And I think the other thing is you cannot control what your survivors are going to say about you, but you can at least have them work from your draft. I think that’s very important. Let them work from your draft.
Very important. So now in recent years, you’ve turned your attention to issues related to the end of life, and you’ve described death as the “ultimate human right” in your book, A Good Death. So can you talk to us a bit about this?
My book, A Good Death, is really a social history of the right-to-die movement. In this country, as many people know, we have options. We have medical assistance in dying, if you qualify, and it’s a medicalized procedure. So, we have the right to say, “I’ve had enough. I want my life to end. My pain is intractable, my suffering is intolerable to me, and I want to have my life ended.” So, it’s a really interesting problem because suicide is not against the law, but having someone help you die was against the law. So the struggle for medical assistance and dying only came about because of legal challenges. These legal challenges were able to be done because we have a charter of rights and freedoms. It’s a charter that allows us to make certain decisions about our own lives and our integrity.
So that was one of the things that I found really interesting because I’ve been writing obituaries for a while, which was my choice. Some people call it the Siberia of journalism, but I actually thought it would be interesting, and it was, it was really interesting. But I was noticing that people were dying in different ways and they were telling their stories because they wanted a change in the law, so that became interesting to me.
The whole business of patient-centered care is also of great interest to me. There was a time when doctors were considered demigods. They made the decisions, we listened. Now it’s a very different process, especially with younger physicians that you work on a problem together, you’re asked your opinion as a patient. So medical assistance in dying in which the patient says, “I am actually done, will I qualify?” And two doctors assess you and say, “Yes, you qualify. You meet the criteria.” And then you can proceed. It’s not for everybody, and it shouldn’t be for everybody, but it is an option that we have in this country.
Yes, and I think we’re seeing more and more of it.
All sorts of topics that used to be taboo in polite society are no longer considered such, even having a conversation like we’re having right now and talking about choosing your own time to go. What do you think we could all gain as a society if we were more comfortable talking about death?
I think that we would have won a huge battle against shame.
I’ll give you a personal example. My mother died of metastasized breast cancer, and she was not very old, she was 65. Her shame at having breast cancer was so extreme that we weren’t allowed to talk about anything. She really wanted to keep it a big secret.
I think that is what happened in the beginning with medical assistance and dying, that you would read in the death notices, “At a time of his choosing,” or, “As he wished.” And of course, I would decode that and look at the bottom of the death notice to see what are the charities. But they were afraid to actually say the cause of death. And as a journalist, I’m always interested in the cause of death.
So I think that now it’s becoming more open. Now, there are very many people who are worried about the increase in the number of people who are choosing medical assistance in dying, but a lot of that has to do with demographics. The fact that we are an aging society and that there are more people living into their 80s and 90s, and as you know, centenarians. So, that’s why there’s going to be an increase in the number of medically assisted deaths. Plus the fact that old people are more prone to have cancer and cardiovascular diseases. And those are the ones most people use as a way of ending their lives or saying, “I want my life to be over.”
But I think we need to talk about these things in the same way that I like to say sex in the Victorian era, we know it happened, but we certainly never talked about it, not in public. So the same thing is true about death, it is part of life. And the choice about death is, I think, the final human right. We now have recognized choices about various other aspects of our lives, but I think that death is the one that is still a bit of a taboo. It’s changing, but it’s still there.
Yeah, I agree with you. I actually read a death notice for a friend of my parents a few weeks ago, and the fact that it was a medically assisted death was called right out in the notice. And it’s quickly becoming, even at that generation, a more normalized conversation, which is great. Maybe it’s easier for them than it is for us as the ones left behind. I don’t know.
Well, and also they’re closer to it.
Yeah. You’ve talked about training oneself to age. What do you mean by that? How do we go about that?
Well, suddenly, I came to the awareness that I’m not that young anymore. I’m a baby boomer, so there we are. It was hard to realize that I fell a few times and I would break things. So I was recognizing that there were things that were happening to me. So now I’ve worked out some systems for dealing with my own life. For example, I never, ever, ever go up or down stairs, and I do it a lot, without holding onto a railing. So these are small examples, but I think every stage of our lives, it’s hard. From learning to be toilet trained or trying to get somebody else toilet trained, adolescence, all of these things require a great deal of patience and thought and learned experience and learned skills. So I think that getting older is also the same thing. We can’t forget about it.
So among the things that I look at as I’m getting older is, am I exercising? Well, not enough. Am I keeping interested in what’s going on in the world? And I find that sometimes one can settle in, especially if one’s part of a long-married couple as I am. You can settle into the comfort of, I don’t know, snacking on popcorn while you watch Netflix or something and that really isn’t good enough. I think you should keep working however you define work, whether it’s volunteerism or it’s helping out here, there, and everywhere, or just writing a novel or something, taking a course. I think that you shouldn’t just slumber into old age. I think you should approach it actively and make the most of this long time we are going to spend. I feel that we should be doing that, and part of that is making plans. How do we want our lives to end? How are we organizing our Wills and our legacies, and what are we doing with all this stuff we’ve accumulated?
Those are big questions and ones that we spend a fair bit of time talking about, not just on this podcast, but in the line of work that I’m in.
Sandra, you’re a fascinating woman. I feel I could listen to your stories of the people you’ve written the legacies for and about for hours. But if you hope our listeners just take one thing away from the conversation you and I have had today, what would that one thing be?
Take care of yourself first. And I don’t mean that with arrogance, but you’re not going to be able to take care of anyone else unless you are at your best. I think so many of us, especially women, if you don’t mind me saying, end up taking care of a lot of people. You can’t neglect yourself. That means knowing how the bank accounts work, knowing where everything is, and how to live a life that is independent and full.
I remember talking with a friend of mine, we were mourning the loss of somebody else, and my friend said, “At least I was widowed when I was 50, so I had time to learn how to live alone.” And I thought that was a really good piece of advice. Say your husband doesn’t want to travel, do it with friends. Go on hiking trips. I think that that is taking care of yourself first, making sure that you are fit, you are capable, and you’re interested in the world around you.
That’s great advice. That’s really a great way to wrap this up. So thank you so much, Sandra, for joining me today to talk about the importance of being the author of your own retirement, end-of-life, and ultimately obituary, planning our own last chapters, and why this matters beyond wealth.
Thank you very much. Nice to talk with you.
You can find out more about Sandra Martin at sandramartinwrites.com. If you enjoyed this episode and you’d like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. Until next time, I’m Leanne Kaufman. Thank you for joining us.
Outro speaker:
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