Working the Dead Beat Read Online Free

else as a teacher, a scholar, and a human being was the thoroughness and integrity of his work. “He let the evidence speak, he didn’t rearrange history to fit his theory,” said Ursula Franklin, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, in an interview. And in contrast to many archaeologists, he had an expansive attitude to diverse sources — science, folklore, oral history — but subjected them to rigorous scrutiny.
    But he wasn’t just an academic. He was a patriot who believed in building an intellectual life here. After university he went on scholarship to do a PhD in anthropology at Yale; at the time there “was no alternative to going abroad to study,” as he wrote later in a biographical essay for The Archaeology of Bruce Trigger: Theoretical Empiricism . He joined the Pennsylvania-Yale expedition to Egypt that was rescuing artifacts before the area was flooded for the Aswan Dam project, which led to his dissertation, “History and Settlement in Lower Nubia.” Despite warnings from his American colleagues that Canada was an academic backwater, he accepted an appointment at McGill University in 1964 and remained there for the next four decades. Although he continued to receive prestigious offers from abroad, he preferred to build a department and a discipline at home rather than chase international scholarly accolades.
    I rarely write about people I know personally. I’d heard of Trigger but I’d never met him or studied his work. Writing his obituary gave me an insight into his research and his life. I talked to students he inspired and to his family, who spoke of the man behind the scholarship, the father who loved to chat expansively at the dinner table and who was so dear that his younger daughter hastily organized her wedding hoping it could take place in his hospital room before he died. Alas, the nuptuals had to take place without the father of the bride. I still haven’t met any of Trigger’s family, but he made such an impact on me that, after death, he was transformed from a stranger into a friend. Learning about his achievements and humanity enhanced my own life.
    Myth Number Three: Obituaries Are Prewritten and Left to Moulder in a Drawer
    NOBODY CAN PREDICT who will be the next to die; there is no launch complete with press kits, media tours, or scheduled interviews to help you cover a subject’s life with authority and dispatch, the way it is with elections, literary prizes, and film premieres. The immediacy and the finality of writing obituaries make my job terrifying. That’s why many obituary writers have nightmares about car crashes and heart attacks carrying off people on their “to-do” list.
    As practitioners we know far too well that the well-stocked “morgue” of meticulously researched, luminously written, and conscientiously updated obituaries ready to roll as soon as the death knell tolls is the biggest myth in the business. “Some newspapers, I’m told, have hundreds of obituaries ready,” Ann Wroe, obituaries editor of the Economist , wrote in 2008. “There are ten obituaries in [our morgue] as I write, and I have never yet been able to pluck one out and use it.” In my own experience, having a prewritten obituary on file is the best guarantee of immortality, because nobody in the morgue ever seems to die. They live on, if only to haunt you for having had the effrontery to anticipate their deaths. As Ann Wroe says, they “achieve a kind of eternal life, getting wirier and stronger by the day.”
    When I started writing obituaries for the Globe and Mail , I quickly discovered that the advances we did have were woefully inadequate. The previous obituary writer had died several years earlier and had not been replaced during one of those periodic downswings in the newspaper business. So nobody had been updating, revising, and writing new obituaries for ages. There were people in the