Digital Dying By: Justin Nobel

by Justin Nobel

Joan Harvey has written over 10,000 obituaries. "Humans need to talk about the death," she said. "Sometimes they want to talk about the death a lot, with a lot of details." (Photo by Justin Nobel)

Joan Harvey has written over 10,000 obituaries for The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon's Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper. She now writes Life Stories for the paper, feature pieces about interesting and unknown Portland people who have just died. Digital Dying spoke with her about what it's like to cover death for a living.

How did you begin writing obituaries?

I used to write a lot of travel and food stories. I ran into an old friend whose mother had been very nice to me as a child. I asked her how her mother was and she burst into tears. After that I started reading the obituaries. I realized their importance, not just as a source of information about a person, but as a history for the whole community.

Do you always include the cause of death?

Sometimes you don't even know the cause of death. The death certificate says something but it isn't always accurate. When AIDS first started, that was such a problem. People didn't want that in, so we had a lot of 30 year-old men dying of pneumonia. But generally, when people lose somebody they want to talk, and sometimes they want to talk about the death a lot, with a lot of details. They have experienced these horrible things and no one else will listen. Other people will come over to comfort them and talk about movies. But humans need to talk about the death too. Read the rest of this entry »