Tag: Find The Good
A Rampage in Florida Shines a Light on Alaska
ANCHORAGE — A deadly shooting rampage at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport this month has focused attention on the interconnection of public safety and mental illness and raised questions, especially here in Alaska, about one of the thorniest questions of psychology: how to tell if someone is delusional and dangerous, or merely delusional.
There is no dispute, law enforcement officials said, that the suspect in the Florida case, Esteban Santiago, was disturbed. When he walked into the F.B.I. offices here in Alaska’s largest city in early November, he said his mind was being controlled by the government. After a voluntary four-day evaluation in a psychiatric hospital, he was released, and soon reclaimed the handgun that the police confiscated when he was admitted. He is now charged with killing five people and injuring six more at the airport on Jan. 6.
In many ways, Mr. Santiago’s path through the mental health treatment system was unremarkable, similar to the one faced by people across the nation, the overwhelming majority of whom will never perform violent acts. Improved insurance coverage is now in place for many people — including an expansion of Medicaid for lower-income adults in Alaska — but a stigma about treatment, combined with a shortage of hospital beds and mental health professionals, keeps many people from getting or accepting care.
In Alaska, health care professionals and legal experts said the distinctive demographic, geographic and cultural stamp of the state also colors the often nuanced judgments that doctors, law enforcement officers and judges must make in deciding whether to hold a disturbed person against his or her will.
Alaska, they said, is ingrained with a deep tradition of tolerance — fueled by libertarian instincts holding that people should be able to believe what they want, however eccentric or irrational. And even when people are involuntarily committed for treatment, the median length of stay, at only five days, is shorter than in almost any other state. Only Wisconsin has a shorter median commitment time, at four days, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national group that works to improve mental health laws and care. The national average is 75 days, with some states, like California, having a median of more than four months.
“Getting a commitment here is really hard,” said Merijeanne Moore, a psychiatrist in private practice in Anchorage.
The mental health needs are great here, too. Alaska has the nation’s second-highest suicide rate, after Wyoming, and some rural areas are by far the worst in America in rates of self-harm, federal figures say. Alaska also has among the highest rates of adult binge drinking, according to federal figures.
A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation ranked it 47th among states and territories in terms of the percentage of mental health care needs being met.
At the same time, the number of beds at the Alaska Psychiatric Institute in Anchorage, the state’s only long-term psychiatric hospital, is now half of what it was in the early 1990s, though many other states also cut their mental health treatment systems during the Great Recession.
“There’s a huge street problem, a huge drug problem and a lot of mentally ill people who don’t even have a finger grip on the lowest rungs of the ladder,” said Paul L. Craig, a neuropsychologist in private practice in Anchorage.
The state does have some mental health treatment strengths. The care system for Native Alaskans, paid for by the federal Indian Health Service, has an extensive mental health program for adolescents. The Department of Veterans Affairs and branches of the military treat tens of thousands of active-duty and retired military personnel.
Dr. Craig and other providers said, though, that those systems of care often function like autonomous empires, without coordination. “People fall through the cracks between them,” he said.
In part, the distinctively Alaskan way of thinking about mental illness may reach back to the era before statehood, which came in 1959. For decades up to that point, residents were committed and sent to a psychiatric hospital in Portland, Ore., from which some never returned. The grounds for commitment — effectively a kind of deportation — sound shocking by today’s standards, including a refusal to speak and excessive masturbation.
Partly in response to complaints about those past practices, Congress in the mid-1950s created the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority, a unique land trust of one million acres, almost the size of Delaware, to produce income dedicated specifically to mental health. The Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority is still active, and has leverage through the millions of dollars it contributes to the state budget through its investments. The trust lobbied hard, in particular, for the expansion of Medicaid in the state.
Guns are also part of the fabric of Alaskan life. Ownership is widespread, and no permit is required for concealed carry. Until 2014, state officials were not required to report data on mental-illness diagnoses to the F.B.I.’s background check system, and Alaska is one of 17 states with no restrictions beyond federal law for keeping guns away from the mentally ill, said the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a national legal research group in San Francisco.
Under federal law, a person who has been involuntarily committed is never again allowed to have firearms.
Mr. Santiago, who entered a no-contest plea last year on a misdemeanor domestic violence charge but has no record of being committed, told the F.B.I. and the Anchorage police in November that he did not want to harm anyone, F.B.I. officials said. He admitted himself to the hospital, so the federal law did not apply. It also meant, law enforcement officials said, that the gun he had in his car when he came into the F.B.I. offices had to be returned to him.
What this case illustrates, said John Snook, the executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center, is that behavior somewhere short of dangerous may not count. “We use this outdated concept,” he said in a telephone interview. “Most people aren’t dangerous, so they don’t get care.”
And sometimes, establishing dangerousness is difficult.
Just before Christmas, a middle-aged woman who had been living in a 16-bed assisted-living home for the mentally ill in Anchorage began screaming and threatened other residents and the staff, said the home’s manager, Erin Terry. She called 911.
But when the police came, the patient refused to repeat her threats, so despite Ms. Terry’s pleas, the officers deemed the woman no danger and left. Several days later, Ms. Terry convinced a judge otherwise, and the woman was involuntarily committed and removed from the home.
“She was beyond our level of care,” Ms. Terry said. “We were terrified.”
Dr. Moore, the psychiatrist, said that in the last few years she has had two patients who, like Mr. Santiago, walked into F.B.I. offices to complain that the government was exerting control over them. Both were examined and released. One patient has since twice been involuntarily committed in other states, Dr. Moore said.
From Dying Patients, Advice on How to Live
ON LIVING
By Kerry Egan
208 pp. Riverhead Books. $24.
Hospice care is rooted in the belief that death is a natural part of life, that dying can be managed so that people may remain alert and as pain-free as possible until the end, and that a good death is as much a spiritual experience as it is a physical one, for all involved.
Here is where my mother would have said: “You must be joking.”
The Harvard Divinity School-educated hospice chaplain Kerry Egan would appreciate that sentiment. After Egan’s 5-year-old says he believes her job is to “make people die so they can go to heaven,” she writes, “He seemed remarkably calm that his mother was a Grim Reaper in clogs.” When a friend quizzes Egan on how she spends her days as a counselor to the dying and their families, Egan explains that she sits at bedsides, tries to be a peaceful presence, listens, sometimes speaks, or sings, or holds a hand, all with as much courage and kindness as she can muster. “I imagine a giant bubble of love encompassing the patient and me,” Egan says. Her friend’s response: “You consider this work?”
Yes, Egan is funny, honest and self-deprecating; however, there is nothing silly at all about her assertion that “the spiritual work of being human is learning how to love and how to forgive.”
“On Living” is part memoir, part spiritual reflection and part narration of tales told to Egan by her patients. Her transitions between other people’s stories and her own personal and professional observations can be disconcerting, but she is such good company that you will forgive her.
Chaplains traditionally hear deathbed confessions. Usually these remain secret. Many of Egan’s patients apparently want her to share theirs, and she honors those requests.
“Promise me you’ll tell my stories,” the elderly Gloria pleads. “Maybe someone else can get wise from them.” Gloria recounts the shame she inflicted on her family with a baby born out of wedlock when she was 19. (Her father “was the strictest father in the world,” who wouldn’t let her “wear skirts above the knee or a smudge of lipstick.”) She chose to keep her son in spite of strong pressure to give him up for adoption. Gloria tells Egan that the man she married, who her son believes is his father, “didn’t love him right.” She wants her son to know the truth, but is afraid to tell him. Gloria’s question — “What if he doesn’t think the best thing I ever did was a good thing at all?” — resonates after the details of the story fade.
Some of Egan’s patients have dementia and terminal cancer. One young man is left a quadriplegic after being shot during a robbery. They rave or mutely clench fists. They lie, they weep, they laugh, they swear, and they tell their stories over and over again. Egan listens, learns and writes it all down. “On Living” adds to the understanding of end-of-life issues in an important and accessible way, because Egan’s patients and caregivers could be you and me, and no doubt will be sooner than we expect. How are we to live in the meantime? Chaplain Egan offers this humble suggestion:
“If there is any great difference between the people who know they are dying and the rest of us, it’s this: They know they’re running out of time. They have more motivation to do the things they want to do, and to become the person they want to become. . . . There’s nothing stopping you from acting with the same urgency the dying feel.” If there is one thing death teaches us, it’s how to live.
BBC Renews Hit Drama ‘Call the Midwife’ for 3 Seasons
“I’m privileged to have Britain’s most popular drama series on BBC One,” says Charlotte Moore, director of BBC content.
The BBC said Wednesday that it has ordered three more seasons of hit drama Call The Midwife for flagship channel BBC One.
Seasons seven to nine were commissioned by Charlotte Moore, director of BBC content, and Piers Wenger, director of BBC drama commissioning. Each season will consist of eight hourlong episodes and a holiday special. The order will take the nuns and midwives featured in the show, which in the U.S. has aired on PBS, into the mid-1960s.
The three-year renewal comes as some U.K. industry watchers have predicted more multiseason show orders amid competition for popular series from Netflix and other digital players. For example, Britain’s Channel 4 lost its hit show Black Mirror to Netflix this year.
Made by Sam Mendes’ Neal Street Productions, Call the Midwife, which debuted in 2012, has been the most-watched drama series in the U.K., the BBC said. All seasons have seen “near or over 10 million viewers per episode,” the public broadcaster said. “The series has been praised for its compassionate and bold approach to issues including stillbirth, mental health, abortion, homosexuality, race and disability.”
Said Pippa Harris, executive producer for Neal Street: “Like a truly supportive parent, the BBC has nurtured our series from conception onwards, and this exceptional three-series commission further demonstrates their care and commitment.”
Said Moore: “I’m privileged to have Britain’s most popular drama series on BBC One, and this new three-[season] commission underlines our commitment to the show.”
Heidi Thomas, creator, writer and executive producer of the show, said: “I am hugely excited by the prospect of creating three more [seasons] of Call the Midwife. In the 1960s, Britain was a country fizzing with change and challenge, and there is so much rich material — medical, social, and emotional — to be explored. We have now delivered well over one hundred babies on screen, and like those babies, the stories keep on coming!”
Season six will start in early 2017.
How Mark Burnett and Roma Downey Will Target Faith-Based Audiences With MGM’s Light TV
The 24/7 network, which will broadcast via Fox affiliates in select cities beginning this December, offers the couple a new way to tackle more religious projects following the success of miniseries ‘The Bible.’
MGM revealed Nov. 16 that Mark Burnett and wife Roma Downey are launching what is being billed as the first 24/7 network for faith and family content. But Light TV is more than meets the eye. Beginning in December, Light TV will be broadcast via Fox affiliates in L.A., New York and several other major cities as a digital multicast, a subchannel like the ones used to broadcast QVC and HSN, as well as such genre-specific channels as African-American-targeted Bounce TV and Katz Broadcasting’s crime- and mystery-focused Escape and action-adventure-themed Grit.
MGM already boasts sci-fi-themed multicast channel Comet and classics provider This TV. Such channels offer MGM a low-cost way to repackage old movies and TV series from its storied library, in Light’s case Rocky, Hoosiers, The Nutcracker, All Dogs Go to Heaven and Pink Panther, while also sharing in a portion of the advertising revenue.
“If you’re a rights owner, you want to figure out how to maximize the value of your portfolio,” says Pivotal Research Group advertising analyst Brian Wieser. “If you’ve got a deep library of content that wasn’t going to see revenue, then it makes sense to do it in this way.”
Roma Downey, Mark Burnett and MGM to Launch Faith Digital Network on Fox Stations
Light TV also gives both the studio and the power couple a new way to reach the growing faith-based audience. Burnett, who serves as president of MGM Television and Digital, and Downey have found success with such religious projects as the miniseries The Bible. Although Downey referred to family-friendly entertainment as “the last unclaimed vertical,” Light TV will face competition from cable competitors Hallmark and Up.
Working in favor of multicast digital channels like Light TV is their easy accessibility. The 5-year-old Bounce is available in 81 percent of U.S. homes. In March, it drew 1.3 million viewers over two airings for the premiere of original soap Saints & Sinners.
Although Light TV is starting out with lower penetration than Bounce, the plan is to strike deals with more Fox affiliates after it launches. Given the potential reach, says Wieser, “there’s a business model to be had there.”
This story first appeared in the Dec. 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
On Six Feet Under and Those Moments When Life and TV Collide
We turn to our favorite television shows for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes it’s because we need a laugh at the end of a long work day during which way too many people used the word webinar. Sometimes our spirits are desperate for a boost and the only thing that can boost them is hearing Tami Taylor say “y’all.” In the case of Game of Thrones, perhaps, it’s because we just want to see Ramsay Bolton finally get his comeuppance, since we all know that until there is justice for Reek and Sansa, there can be no peace.
But sometimes specific TV shows become therapeutic in more profound ways, by showing up at exactly the moment we need them most. I’m thinking about this today because, as the anniversary-happy internet reminds us, June 3 marks the 15th anniversary of the premiere of HBO’s Six Feet Under, the drama that introduced us to the Fisher family, their funeral home, and the notion that television can alert us, on a weekly basis, that every last one of us is mortal. (HBO2 is in the midst of running a marathon of all five seasons, so feel free to cancel your weekend plans.) While it sometimes got overshadowed by other HBO series of its era, most notably The Sopranos, Six Feet Under is still rightfully regarded as one of the most finely etched family dramas of TV’s so-called second Golden Age, and a show that felt extraordinarily personal to many people for a simple, obvious reason: We all lose loved ones. Eventually, we all must face death. Sometimes that even happened while we were watching the Fishers lose people and face death on Six Feet Under.
When the fifth and final season aired on HBO during the summer of 2005, my father was dying. He had pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease that can go from bad to seriously awful rather quickly. At least that’s how it went for him. My dad was such an upbeat person and such a minimizer of the negative that I continued to believe he had weeks when in reality, he only had days, and then hours.
On July 24, 2005, the Six Feet Under episode, “Singing for Our Lives,” aired. That’s the one in which the show’s principal Fisher, Nate (Peter Krause), has a brain embolism and collapses. (Yes, this is the one with the “Narm,” which, in a way, was the Hodor of 2005.) On July 26, 2005, my father died. On Sunday, July 31, 2005, we held a wake for him; the funeral was scheduled for the following Monday morning.
On that final Sunday night in July, with my eulogy written but not yet delivered, I had a lot on my mind. But I also, technically, had time to watch the new episode of Six Feet Under, “Ecotone,” a gloriously messy heartbreak of a bottle episode where everyone gathers at the hospital following Nate’s collapse, and they — and we — wait to see if he’ll be okay. I don’t remember if I knew for a fact that Krause’s character would die in that episode or if I just strongly suspected it. All I know is I wrestled with whether it was appropriate to watch it under the circumstances of my actual life. I loved the show, and spending an hour with it would give me a break from feeling both nervous about my speech and shocked that my dad was gone. But it wasn’t going to be a break from my grief. In fact, it would be an invitation to lean even harder into it, an invitation I wasn’t sure I wanted to accept.
Ultimately I chose to watch, and was glad that I did. The following Sunday, when the Fishers gathered for Nate’s funeral less than a week after my family had gathered for my dad’s, I wrestled again, and ultimately watched again. That episode and the remaining episodes of that season served as both an odd comfort and, more importantly, an outlet for my own emotional release.
I am extremely skilled at boxing up my emotions. Give me a feeling that’s connected to something real and upsetting that’s happened in my actual life, and I will put that feeling in a box and tuck it into the back corner of a shelf in my psyche faster than you can say Walking Psychological Container Store. But when I watch great TV — or see an amazing movie, or listen to a particularly meaningful song — that’s when my emotions leak out. Sometimes that’s because of the actual content of the art. When I cry during the closing montage of the final episode of Six Feet Under, yes, it’s because I love those characters, and my God, they’re all dying, and good Lord, they’re all dying while this Sia song is completely wrecking me. But when I cried during that montage the first time I saw it, in the summer of 2005, I know a lot of those tears were tears for my father that couldn’t find their way out until Six Feet Under unlocked them.
Our lives and the people in them are precious and real. They will always be more important to us than our favorite TV shows. But there are certain series that connect so deeply to our hearts and become so intertwined with our own personal experiences that they get braided directly into our existences. For you, memories of high school may be intertwined with memories of watching Gilmore Girls. A friendship may be defined by its whispered confidences and inside jokes, but also by the fact that it began because of a shared love of Twin Peaks.
There are a lot of shows like this for me, and Six Feet Under is certainly one of them. I loved that show for its boldness, for its macabre sense of humor (it pretty much had me from Claire stealing that foot in season one), for its consistently moving performances, and for its ability to capture the strange, surreality of this thing called life in ways that made my heart feel full.
But I will reserve a more special place for Six Feet Under, forever, because it helped me say good-bye to my dad.
Small-town Alaska newspaper for sale, cheap, as publisher’s wife decides she wants a flush toilet
- Author:
- Updated: 2 days ago
- Published 2 days ago
Tom Morphet at his desk at the Chilkat Valley News in Haines, Alaska. (Courtesy Tom Morphet.)
Haines Borough Assemblyman Tom Morphet didn’t like a headline last week about his demand for a special election, but he couldn’t complain because he owns the newspaper.
Morphet ran the Chilkat Valley News for 25 years before he bought it five years ago. But this year he got tired of watching from the sidelines of local politics. He tried to sell the paper to avoid a conflict of interest — for a fourth of what he paid for it — but the sale fell through.
The hot issue in Haines right now is whether to go ahead with a harbor expansion project. Morphet thought the Assembly was rushing to hire a contractor. He wants voters to weigh in before the borough signs anything.
At 55, he needs a new career. His wife, Jane Pascoe, has her eye on a house in town that, unlike his cabin in the woods 8 miles out, has power and water.
“I said, ‘Honey, we could live for free in the cabin.’ But she wants to flush a toilet,” Morphet said. “When I met her she was a girl living out of a backpack and she didn’t care.”
Morphet accepted poverty for decades to do no-nonsense journalism in a tiny town that could barely support it and didn’t always appreciate it. The News has won 20 Alaska Press Club awards in the last three years but sells only 1,500 copies at the height of the visitor season.
Heather Lende, also elected to the Assembly in October, began her writing career at the paper. She still gets $75 apiece for obituaries, long after much larger papers, including this one, switched from staff-written obits to making money by letting families write their own. Morphet treats every obituary as a hard news story.
Lende has published three books based on her Haines obituaries, developing a national reputation as an essayist. But she said Morphet still makes her verify every fact and flatten her prose into straight, short newspaper sentences.
She said he’s stubborn, raises his voice at times and makes enemies.
“Most people thought when Tom ran there was no way he would get elected,” Lende said. “Except for Tom. And he campaigned unbelievably … Even when people would slam the door, he’d say, ‘wait-wait-wait.’ “
In the end, Lende said, even some of those who didn’t like him realized a tough, ethical, inquisitive guy could represent them well.
Morphet grew up near Philadelphia. He spent summers home from Marquette University working in the engine rooms of oil tankers. Bumming around after graduation, he saw an ad in a Seattle paper that brought him to Alaska.
“They suckered me in,” he recalled. “The ad said, ‘Seeking adventure?’ Yes, that’s me. ‘Seafood processors needed.’ “
The hilariously awful, minimum wage job on a floating slime line — with rotting fish and no water for bathing for up to two weeks at a stretch — landed him in Anchorage in 1984. He worked at the Anchorage Times until, adventure over, he drove toward home, his Datsun’s hood secured with a camera strap.
A two-day wait for the ferry south in Haines caught him. The sun was out.
“I couldn’t understand why there weren’t more people here. It was the prettiest place I had ever seen,” Morphet said.
Shortly, he had a temporary job for the local paper. Which slowly turned permanent.
Morphet took breaks. He bought his cabin and 5 acres with money he earned at a construction site in Las Vegas in 1991, where he watched tortoises to keep them from being run over. He met his wife, Pascoe, an Australian, on the dance floor at the Alaskan Bar in Juneau during another work break from journalism in 2001.
The breaks helped him to survive in Haines. Good journalists make people mad, which in a small town means alienating neighbors and advertisers.
Morphet particularly remembers the anger when the News reported in the 1990s that a local teen had been drinking before a fatal auto accident. A group of local business people started another paper that would be more positive and less liberal. It didn’t last, but the lack of advertising from the town’s grocery stores is still a major financial issue.
“It’s a real tightrope walk to uphold the standards of journalism in a town this small, because there is not a buffer between the reporters and the people they write about,” Morphet said. “What you write becomes very personal very quickly.”
The harbor issue is his latest battle. Morphet called for a vote in an editorial last year. When it didn’t happen, he decided to run. He offered to sell the paper to his reporter for a deep discount to prevent a conflict of interest, but she left instead.
He is still trying to sell, but with heavy conditions.
“I only want it to go to a local person who is committed to the community,” he said. “When you’ve done this for 25 or 30 years, what you have in it is something different than cash. You have an investment in the community.”
Morphet said the $60,000 he paid for the News — on installments — bought him a $50,000-a-year, seven-day-a-week job. The paper doesn’t bring in enough money for an owner to take out a profit without also working there.
He’d like to go back to his original plan to be a historian.
Morphet expected to major in history at Marquette, but when he arrived as a freshman his counselor told him he would probably end up selling pants at Sears. Morphet thought of his Aunt Stella, who had sold him a new pair of double-knit slacks every year of his childhood.
“He didn’t know it, but he hit me right in my Achilles. I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to end up like Aunt Stella,’ ” Morphet said. “He said, ‘I encourage you to pursue journalism, because at least you’ll be able to make a living.’ It was probably the worst advice I ever took.”
The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com or click here to submit via any web browser.
Obit for the Obits
No sense in burying the lede. This week, after more than eight years of lively habitation in one of journalism’s more obscure corners, I’m making a final egress, passing on. Starting after Friday’s deadline (ha!) I am an ex-obit writer.
Here’s my legacy. A thousand salutes to the departed, something like that. Age range 11 to 104. Cops and criminals, actors and athletes, scientists and judges, politicians and other poobahs. Famous, infamous or as obscure as the rest of us except for one instance of memorable distinction. A man with a mountain named for him, another who hijacked a plane. A woman who changed infant care for the better, another who shot a ballplayer. High achievers who died after long and fruitful lives (Yogi Berra, Ruby Dee, E. L. Doctorow) or whose unanticipated demise (Grete Waitz, Philip Seymour Hoffman, David Carr) demanded furiously quick reporting and writing — and attention on the front page.
Name a profession (Scream queen? Used car dealer? Astronaut? Guru?) or an achievement (Solved an equation? Caught a killer? Integrated a sitcom?) or an ignominious label (Pederast? Con artist? Embezzler?). For whatever reason — AIDS or Alzheimer’s, cancer or a car crash, heart failure or kidney disease, sepsis or suicide — they all went on my watch.
We’re accustomed, my colleagues and I, to saying that an obituary is not about a death, but a life. This is true, but really, we’re reporters and you can’t avoid the news, which is, of course, the same news every time. That’s one thing that distinguishes writing obituaries from anything else in journalism.
Another is that we start at the end and look backward. There’s some reward in this, in the excavating we do that often unearths interesting, long-forgotten facts.
But it’s melancholy, too. We had a movie made about us recently, a documentary called “Obit,” and in it my former deskmate Doug Martin, who effected his own exit from the obit business a couple of years ago, made a comment of encapsulating rue. He often admired the people he wrote about, he said, but he never got to meet them.
I’ve had a long career at this newspaper, three decades, exercising, for better or worse, a good deal of imagination. But in the last eight-plus years I haven’t had to come up with a story idea. I’ve spent hundreds of afternoons burrowing deep into cyberspace and perusing yellowed news clippings from The Times’s historical archive, a.k.a. the morgue. And then the phone interviews — necessary, sometimes grueling, often poignant with laughter or tears, half consulting with and half consoling friends and relatives of the dead who hope I’m giving credence and gravity to their anguish and not sucking the marrow out of it.
I hardly ever left the office; that bugs me. A few trips to the library or a bookstore, once or twice to a museum, the apartment of the widow of a former Marlboro Man who had some old ads I wanted to see. Not the most adventurous reporting in the world.
All that said, I don’t think it’s self-aggrandizing to say that obituary writing is important work. An obituary is, after all, the first last word on a life, a public assessment of a human being’s time on earth, a judgment on what deserves to be remembered. In addition, though we write for readers of all stripes, of course, and not especially for those in mourning, I suspect all of us who do this keep the loved ones in mind, and if we don’t seek their approval exactly — unsavory details are often unavoidable — we strive to write so that they at least recognize the person they’ve lost. Journalism isn’t supposed to be a personal service, but obituary writing, without compromising any professional integrity, can be. Maybe should be. In any case, getting it right is not easy. And getting it wrong can cause real distress to the already distressed.
Obituary writers tend to be older people, at least at The Times, where the average age of the reporters and editors on the obits desk is higher than that of any other department. This is as it should be. Partly, I guess, they don’t want us running around too much, approaching decrepitude as we are. But mostly it’s because we’ve shared a lot of time on earth with our subjects and have lived through much of the history they helped make. Not incidentally, we’ve all had the experience of grief and know what it feels like to live in the immediate aftermath of personal tragedy.
The significant irony to retiring from the obits department is this: I may be going but you’re not quite rid of me. My byline is likely to continue to appear for months, even years, because of the 40 or 50 obituaries I’ve written of people who are still living — the future dead, as we say, in mordant obit-speak. Perhaps I’ll even have a posthumous byline or two — not something I aspire to, by the way.
Advances are what we call these obituaries written in, well, advance. It’s a practical matter; you can’t write the comprehensive life story of a president or a pope or a movie star in an hour or even a day. But think about the presumption of such an enterprise. We know they’re going. We don’t know how. We don’t know when.
Which is, of course, the main reason I’m getting out while the getting is good.
Brexit Is “Major Blow” to Film, TV Industries
“This decision has just blown up our foundation,” says the independent film and TV alliance after Britain votes to leave the European Union.
The entertainment industry is reeling following the result of the historic Brexit vote, warning that Britain’s decision to leave the European Union could have disastrous consequences.
Film and television producers worry the Brexit will create uncertainty and could unravel much of the financial infrastructure the independent industry relies on.
“The decision to exit the European Union is a major blow to the U.K. film and TV industry,” said Michael Ryan, chairman of the Independent Film & Television Alliance in a statement. “This decision has just blown up our foundation — as of today, we no longer know how our relationships with co-producers, financiers and distributors will work, whether new taxes will be dropped on our activities in the rest of Europe or how production financing is going to be raised without any input from European funding agencies. The U.K. creative sector has been a strong and vibrant contributor to the economy — this is likely to be devastating for us.”
The British entertainment industry came out almost unanimously in favor of remaining in the EU, warning that a Brexit would threaten the export of British film and TV series to Europe and would cut off British filmmakers from European subsidies, such as the MEDIA program, which funneled around $180 million into Brit productions between 2007 and 2015.
Pact, an association that represents independent producers in Britain, said it was “disappointed” with the Brexit vote, given that 85 percent of its members voted in a survey before the referendum to remain in the EU. Pact, however, said it would work with the U.K. government and EU institutions to ensure that U.K. producers maintain the “commercial advantages that we currently have.” The group admitted Brexit meant “there will be a degree of uncertainty in the medium-term” as Britain negotiates its exit from the EU.
While noting that a survey of its members showed a 96 percent support for Remain, and just 4 percent in favor of Brexit, the Federation said it was “vital for all sides to work together to ensure that the interests of our sector on issues, including access to funding and talent, are safeguarded as the U.K. forges its new relationship with Europe. The importance of British culture in representing our country to the world will be greater than ever.”
The Federation noted that Britain’s creative industries were worth $117 billion (£84.1 billion) to the economy in 2013-2014 and Europe is currently the largest export market for the U.K.’s creative industries, accounting for 57 percent of all overseas trade.
Earlier this week, a group of leading film producers, led by Working Title’s Tim Bevan and including James Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, Iain Canning (The King’s Speech), Lord David Puttnam (Chariots of Fire), Matthew Vaughn (Kingsman: The Secret Service) and Elizabeth Karlsen (Carol) urged to country to reject Brexit. The group warned of a return to the “horror” of a pre-EU world, where British exports were subject to taxes and tariffs when they crossed European borders.
“Our global creative success would be severely weakened by walking away,” the letter read. “From the smallest gallery to the biggest blockbuster, many of us have worked on projects that would never have happened without vital funding or by collaborating across borders.”
A pre-Brexit study by research group Enders Analysis forecast a possible “post-Brexit recession” that “will cause a hyper-cyclical decline in the advertising revenues of broadcasters and publishers” in the U.K.
The Enders study said the British audiovisual industry was “highly exposed” because more than half of its exports, which totaled $5.5 billion (£4 billion) in 2014, go to the EU. It warned that the Brexit would “further compromise” its growth forecast for the U.K. industry, which had been for 5.4 percent growth in advertising revenue for the 2016-2018 period.
Once outside the European Union common market, Britain will have to renegotiate its status. Brexit supporters point to countries such as Norway and Iceland, which are not EU members but enjoy access to the common market as members of the European Economic Area (EEA).
The Enders report, however, notes that EEA members are still required to implement the EU’s regulations, even if they have no say in writing them. The EU could object to certain aspects of British law that favor its local industry, such as the U.K.’s generous tax breaks for TV and film productions that shoot there.
Speaking at the Cannes Lions conference on Friday, William Lewis, CEO of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, spoke to risks to the broader U.K. economy post-Brexit. While he urged caution, he said he thinks financial services will make a quick exit from the U.K. and relocate to other places in Europe following the Leave vote.
‘Call the Midwife’ Deserves More Respect for Its Depth and Daring
In the April 24 episode of the BBC series “Call the Midwife,” which just ended an especially strong fifth season on PBS, a nun (played by the wonderful Jenny Agutter) witnesses the birth of a severely deformed baby. Later, searching for the infant at the request of its anxious mother, the nun finds it abandoned, still breathing, in a hospital laundry room. Someone has placed the newborn in front of an opened window.
Watching that scene, what snaps your head back is not the horror of its subject but the matter-of-factness of its execution. Like most of this show’s unfailingly humane explorations of life in a poor dockside neighborhood of London in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the mercy killing of a child suffering the appalling side effects of the morning-sickness drugthalidomide is handled with quiet compassion and without judgment.
This generosity of spirit and unwillingness to condemn are the most endearing traits of “Call the Midwife,” based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, a nurse who sadly died before the first episode was broadcast.
Set at a time when homosexuality and abortion were illegal and the National Health Service was still finding its feet, the series weaves questions of identity, agency and survival into episodes that, without fuss or fanfare, confront the show’s staunch midwives with problems like incest, chemical castration, syphilis and sex slavery.
Yet the darkness of the story lines never slows the brisk pacing or dulls the cheering warmth of the photography. Otherwise, some scenes would be almost unbearable to watch.
As it is, the show is rarely less than touching and often — like the Season 5 finale, which brings the death of a major character — quite devastating. (It also features the most realistic newborns on television, where babies usually arrive looking weirdly alien or, worse, virtually ready for preschool.) Mingling the spiritual and the secular with a deftness that might be unique on television, the stories address moral challenges like prostitution and the contraceptive pill with bracing pragmatism. Sudden swerves into melodrama, like a recent subplot about a nun’s beating at the hands of a rogue Russian sailor, are short-lived; the quotidian challenges of the poor and pregnant are enough to guarantee a swift return to narrative equilibrium.
Yet despite provocative writing, a terrific ensemble cast and around 8 million viewers each episode in Britain, the program has mostly been denied the critical respect garnered by that flashier yet infinitely less audacious dive into British history, “Downton Abbey.” Some of this is undoubtedly because of gender bias, both in the show’s makeup and its appeal. With mainly female stars, writers and directors, and conceived and produced by the award-winning playwright Heidi Thomas — the granddaughter of a suffragist — “Midwife” has feminism hot-wired into its DNA, simultaneously flaunting its soapy credentials and pushing insistently against their assumptions and restrictions.
I wasn’t always a believer, originally finding the show, with its sleeves-rolled-up capableness, a little corny and overly idealized. But beneath the cozy cardigans and sensible shoes, the nurse-and-vicar hookups and endless cups of tea, this Sunday-night comfort food has revealed an emotional depth and daring that have won me over. Washed in a delightful soundtrack of crooners and early pop stars (a recent scene, scored to the sexy come-on of April Stevens’s “Teach Me Tiger,” perfectly captures the eroticism of inexperience), the program excels at easily digested grit.
After more than a decade of watching cold, alienated male antiheroes with thousand-yard stares hijack our television landscapes and critical plaudits, the show’s warm communalism reminds us that being human — never mind a mother — is an experience that’s much better when shared.
Concerned with choice in the most universal sense, its portrait of women navigating a world that’s rapidly opening up yet still frustratingly restrictive — plotlines about back-street abortion and the difficulty of celibacy are as relevant today as in the 1950s — feels disarmingly honest and real.