Public Representations of Loss in Death Announcements,1912 to 2002

Abstract

This work presents a historical analysis of death announcements (N = 1,443) posted in the New York Times between 1912 and 2002. Announcements were coded according to two main categories: the genre of the announcement and the presence of emotion words. Four distinct main genres emerged: death notices, memorials, recognition postings by organizations, and recognition postings by nonorganizational parties (friends and family). The proportion of death notices declined steadily from 1912 to 2002, while the proportion of announcements paying tribute to the deceased increased. The announcements were also analyzed in terms of emotion words used, and it is argued that the increasing frequency of emotion words used in the death announcements reflects a progressive emotionalization and psychologization of grief and loss.

Keywords

death announcements emotion loss grief public ritual

Introduction

Anthony Giddens (1991, p. 112) has described death as one of the “fateful moments” in modern life; as an event that draws attention to self and heightens reflexive awareness of the course of one’s life. Death of a loved one is experienced as a loss, where grief is an accompanying and foregrounded emotion that has to be worked through individually and privately. Thus, Walter (2008, 2015) has been able to argue that bereavement in the modern West has become a matter of self-regulation, or self-supervision, which echoes Giddens’ observations about death and one’s self.

In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the history of emotions in general (Dixon, 2012), and of grief in particular (Granek, 2010; Louw & Van Hoorn, 2014). A central proposition of work in this field is that the experience of loss by individuals has historically been variable. Certainly the transformation in human selfhood in the West, in which modern human beings understand and experience themselves as individuals with a unique inner self, has led to important changes in the management of loss (Jansz, 2004; Reeves, 2011).

The modern bereaved frequently report, above all, a sense of being alone in their grief and not authentically understood, particularly as friends and colleagues seemingly grow tired of their somberness and sorrow (Granek & O’Rourke, 2011). At the same time, individuals’ lives are more socially and physically isolated, where the communities, and rituals, that have traditionally given solace for the grieving bereaved are less at-hand (Walter, 2007). Nowadays the options available are to see a counselor, to join a mutual support group, or, more recently, to join an online bereavement forum. Generally, the message to the bereaved is to expect the loss of a loved one to decisively change their world, and to involve very normal feelings, which supposedly are part of an “emotional reaction” called grief. At the same time though, the bereaved learns that “there is no right or wrong way to grieve after a loss” (National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, n.d.).

In this article, we would like to add to the burgeoning literature on historical changes in grieving, by analyzing death announcements placed in the New York Times (NYT) over most of the 20th century. The advantage of analyzing death announcements is that this form of death notice has quite a long history in Western countries, and it may therefore allow a glimpse into long-term historical changes in grieving rituals and norms within a specific cultural group. Death announcements have indeed been studied frequently as a genre to search for changes over time—not only with regard to how the announcements themselves change but also with regard to how changes in death notices reflect broader social and cultural changes. Ergin (2010), for example, studied more than 2,500 death announcements in a Turkish newspaper, to show how changes in this genre reflected changing attitudes toward gender, ethnic or religious minority status, and cultural capital in Turkey. Death announcements have also been studied from a linguistic perspective: Afful (2012), for instance, found that the schematic structure, together with lexicogrammatical features, of these announcements pointed to a set of underlying sociocultural norms and values in Ghana. Phillips (2007, p. 326), also using the NYT as an empirical base, analyzed how the presentation of death changed over the 20th century, and he proposed that the “locus of social control” over death shifted from God, to medicine, and most recently to the individual.

Death announcements typically are placed in a newspaper, normally paid for and written by a family member or a close friend (although, as we shall see, organizations sometimes also do this for their deceased members). One has to exercise some caution in interpreting these notices, as they do not necessarily reflect how people experienced loss. It is more feasible to think of them as reflecting the emotionology of the time (Stearns & Stearns, 1985)—the set of implicit and explicit rules for the social and public handling of affectively charged states. One can think of the notices as occupying a space between public articulations of emotions and individuals’ private experiences. Stearns and Stearns originally identified advice literature as an ideal primary source for analyzing emotionology, but we believe death announcements are unique historical sources to observe similar changes in emotionology (Ergin, 2010; Phillips, 2007).

Method

Sample

The NYT was selected as a source for the present analysis, as it is widely circulated (it is the second most widely circulated newspaper in the United States according to the Associated Press [2013]). It has been published consistently since 1851, and its exemplary and complete archives are accessible to subscribers through its website (www.nytimes.com). As such, it can be regarded as an important historical source, even in the history of psychology (Rutherford, 2000).

We selected four time periods to sample from, spanning from the early 20th century to the early 21st century. Time period choices such as these will to some extent always be arbitrary but because the main purpose was to cover a long enough time span, so as to detect any changes over time in the articulation of emotions (if any), we needed to sample at least across the whole of the previous century. In addition, we were mindful of Stearns’s (1994) work on the transformation of 20th century American grief. He argued that a new emotional culture emerged during the second quarter of the 20th century, which were more cautious and restrained about emotions than the preceding Victorian style. By the 1950s this cool emotional style was well established, gained further ground, and solidified through the 1960s and 1970s. We therefore included four time periods to sample from one prior to the 1920s, as the Victorian emotional style came to an end; one from the early 1950s and one from the late 1970s, to cover the emerging styles mentioned above; and one including the first years of the 21st century, what Walter (2007) referred to as the postmodern era of grief. The periods we examined are as follows:

1912 to 1917 (200 announcements)

1951 to 1957 (475 announcements)

1976 to 1980 (438 announcements)

2000 to 2002 (330 announcements).

The time span for our study was also influenced by more practical considerations. It started in 1912, because the “In Memoriam” column by then became an established part of the newspaper (between two and four each day). It ended in 2002, as the NYT changed its submission process in this year to work through a website (Legacy.com), which provides online obituaries and guest books. This was done to avoid skewing the data with online-type behavior.

A random number generator was used to select dates from within the selected time spans, and all announcements published on those dates were sampled and analyzed. As a result, the number of announcements per time period differed. For practical reasons, we decided to obtain a minimum of 200 announcements from each time period.

The final number of announcements captured was thus 1,443, which is a good number compared with previous comparative research on death announcements, where the number of announcements has ranged between 450 and 2,500 (e.g., Barth, Van Hoof, & Beldad, 2014; Ergin, 2010; Phillips, 2007).

Coding

We regarded content analysis as the most direct method to examine the announcements, as it is similar to the strategies that have been used by other researchers, such as Barth et al. (2014). The announcements were coded according to two main categories: the genre of the announcement and the presence of emotion words in the text.

Genre analysis is concerned with what information is included to make a specific type of text. A death notice, for example, can be seen as consisting of a number of necessary or optional plots, such as listing the name of the deceased, their surviving family, and the place where the funeral will take place (Afful, 2012). Each plot may have certain lexicogrammatical features or may be identified in terms of the overall communicative goal or discursive function (Moses & Marelli, 2003). In practice, a genre analysis typically examines features and functions, with relatively more or less emphasis on either (Bhatia, 2002). In the present study, the notices were categorized according to four main genres: death notices, memorials (remembrances), recognition postings by organizations (mostly lodges, religious organizations, and companies), and recognition postings by nonorganizational parties (placed by friends and relatives).

In studying the history of emotions, Rosenwein (2010) argued that emotion-type words (hereafter “emote-words”) should be problematized, rather than taken for granted. The term emotion itself, upon closer examination, turns out to be of recent origin. As Dixon (2006) pointed out, the classical Western understanding of human beings has been that they are driven and guided by passions, rather than emotions. It was only in the 19th century that this aspect of life became characterized by the term emotions. The Oxford English Dictionary (2015) also indicates that the interpretation of grief as mental anguish (often directly related to a death) rather than bodily harm came about in the mid-19th century.

We used 1912 as the starting date for data collection, which meant that the overall concept of emotion has become sufficiently stable in the West that the above concerns do not apply. Our strategy was to identify words that we regarded as conveying emotional content, and we then counted words these across the four genres. These words were as follows: “bereaved/bereft (family),” “condolences,” “comforted,” “console/solace,” “celebrate,” “grief/grieving,” “hearts go out,” “lonely,” “miss(ed)(ing),” “mourn,” “pain,” “regret,” “sad(dened)(ness),” “sorrow,” and “sympathy.”

Results and Discussion

Genres

Table 1 summarizes the distribution of the four genres in the death announcements over the four time periods chosen, and Figure 1 presents the information graphically.

Table 1.

Distribution of Genres Across the Four Time Periods.

Genres	1912–1917		1951–1955		1976–1980		2000–2002
Genres	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%
Death notices	173	86.5	361	76.0	305	69.6	181	54.9
Organizational recognitions	10	5.0	89	18.7	109	24.9	99	30.0
Nonorganizational recognitions	–	–	2	0.5	3	0.7	30	9.1
Memorials	17	8.5	22	4.6	21	4.8	21	6.0

Figure 1.

Distribution of genres over the four time periods (1912–2002).

Death notices constituted 86.5% of the announcements in the 1910s but only 54.9% by the 2000s. They contained mostly just the name of the deceased, their date of death, and funeral information (optional). In the beginning of our time span, the notices were authored by funeral homes, but increasingly the death of the loved one was announced by their families. This shift in authorship was often accompanied by the addition of some emotional content, as can be seen from the notice later:

BROMBERG − Stephen N. Died on January 4, 2002. He is survived by wife Judith, [children, etc.] Memorial services to be held at [location]. In lieu of flowers, donations to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International. We love you and will always miss you, Granddad. (NYT, 2002-01-08, emphasis added)

The death notices in the NYT are generally followed by an “In Memoriam” column. Memorials contain the name of the deceased, accompanied by a message of loving memory, a remark or letter addressed to the dead, or the announcement of a memorial service. They make up a relatively small part of the death announcements over all four time periods and are almost always placed by family members. In the 1910s, the column conveyed predominantly memorial service information, but by the 1950s, there was a distinct shift to include brief memorializing sentiments, such as the following:

KURIE−Hyman. In fond memory of grandpa who passed away ten years ago. LEON, MANUEL, ROBERT. (NYT, 1952-08-08)

Announcements conveying recognition by organizations increased steadily over the century. In the beginning, they mainly announced the death and funeral of an associate and requested attendance by members of the organization. One could say that the announcements are not truly recognitional at this stage, because they do not pay tribute to the deceased, or express condolences. In subsequent years, from the 1950s onwards, organizations indeed used death announcements to offer condolences, or to pay tribute to the deceased. In 1915, for example, the following announcement appeared (Le Brun), and we compare it below to an announcement from 1976 (Katz−Morris):

LE BRUN.− The Associates of the Helpers of the Holy Souls are invited to attend the funeral of their beloved President, Miss Adelo Le Brun, at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola […]. (NYT, 1915-12-12, emphasis added)

KATZ−Morris, The United Jewish Appeal−Federation of Jewish Philanthropies Joint Campaign was saddened to learn of the passing of a dear friend, a founder of UJA […] May his grieving family, friends and colleagues be comforted by the knowledge that his was a life that illuminated the highest traditions of our faith. (NYT, 1976-01-23, emphasis added)

A small number of nonorganizational announcements started to appear in the 1970s, but it is only in the early part of the 21st century that we see a real presence of such recognition (approximately 9% of the notices). A reliable indicator of difference from the organizational announcements was the absence of a titled signatory, or explicit statement on behalf of an organization. The announcements by friends and relatives were used to offer condolences, for private tributes, or for messages to the dead. They also frequently contained an emotional element, characterized by the words miss or missing. The message cited later shows a fairly typical tribute containing condolences:

KIAM−Victor. Victor’s enthusiasm, enjoyment of life, and positive attitude enriched our lives. We will miss our good friend, Life Master, bridge opponent, and tennis champion buddy. To his wonderful family, we send our love and sympathy. (Betty and John, NYT, 2001-05-31)

In our sample from the 1910s, we found no mention of the word loss in the announcements. In the 1950s, it was almost routine to refer to the deceased as being lost to others, such as in “for their and our loss” (NYT, 1954-07-26). The word loss at first was observed principally in organizational announcements (in 86% of the announcements in the 1950s):

BRUDNER−Lottie. Grossinger Family Circle expresses its deepest sorrow at the passing of one of its beloved founders. She was a devoted and sincere friend to all who knew her. We mourn our loss. (NYT, 1951-11-08)

Nonorganizational announcements contained very few mentions of the word loss (9%), and death notices contained even fewer mentions (3%). Only one use of this word was found in the “In Memoriam” column:

WAGNER−Norman William. In loving memory of Dad on this eighth anniversary of our great loss. YOUR FAMILY. (NYT, 1976-06-08)

By the early part of the 21st century, almost a third of the death announcements included recognition of loss, and not just information about a death. If one interprets loss somewhat more broadly, in terms of the notices explicitly acknowledging the bereaved’s emotional state (and sometimes that of the deceased), this theme is even more pronounced. This is evident from the following notice on the death of a well-known real-estate developer:

MENDIK−Bernard. Lincoln Square Synagogue records with sorrow the passing of our benefactor and friend, Mr. Bernard Mendik. May the family be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. (NYT, 2001-05-31)

Ergin (2012) identified the centrality of loss in more recent death notices (after 1970s) as a feature of what he called postmodern constructions of death. Such constructions of death differ from premodern and modern constructions in terms of the metaphors of loss and “departure from this world,” rather than in terms of arrival in another world. Bernard Mendik’s memorial above refers to loss in the sense that the deceased is lost to the world but also to the profound impact of his death on people’s lives. Ergin (2012, p. 276) ties this in with a more general phenomenon, namely fear of the death of others, and the prospect that this entails: “Postmodern announcements, bearing witness to the realization of this fear, replace the clichéd language of detachment common in modern announcements with expressions of loss and grief.”

In conclusion, taken over nearly a century of death announcements, the proportion of death notices declines steadily, while the proportion of announcements that recognize or pay tribute to the deceased increases, particularly since the beginning of the 21st century. Organizational recognition begins to include elements of condolence and emotion (in our study, since the 1950s), a move which is echoed in the nonorganizational announcements dating from the early part of the 21st century.

Emotions

Table 2 depicts the number of times emote-words appeared for each genre, across the four time periods, as well as the number of times that the genre itself appeared.

Table 2.

Emote-Words Words per Genre and Era.

	Death notices			Organizational recognitions			Nonorganizational recognitions			Memorials			Total
Era	e	N	%	e	N	%	e	N	%	e	N	%	e	N	%
1910s	1	173	0.6	5	10	50	–	–	–	1	17	5.9	7	200	3
1950s	1	361	0.3	86	89	97	2	2	100	1	22	4.5	90	474	19
1970s	3	305	1.0	108	109	99	2	3	67	10	21	48	123	438	28
2000s	39	181	22	98	99	99	23	30	77	4	21	19	164	331	50

e = number of instances of emote-words; N = number of instances of the genre; % = percentage of announcements in each era containing emote-words.

The announcements that appeared in the 1910s seem to act as public media platforms for broadcasting objective information about recent deaths, containing information about a service of remembrance. In the few instances that we could find, words such as sorrow, regret, celebrate, or mourn were used. Thus, there was little or no evidence of emotional content, at least in the way that we defined the phenomenon here.

The first time one sees a substantial number and percentage of emotional elements emerge is in the organizational recognitions in the 1950s, when words such as sympathy, condolences, and console, and words suggesting relations, such as bereaved are used. The examples of the notices for Le Brun and Katz, respectively, mentioned earlier illustrate this development quite well. It is possible to interpret this as the presence of a condoling repertoire, where attempts are made to comfort the bereaved.

Additional evidence for increasing emotionality in death notices can be found in the emergence of a new form of announcement in the 1950s, namely “Letters to the Deceased.” This form of announcement has also occurred in countries such as Iceland and Turkey, and in online bereavement behavior, be it on Legacy.com or on Facebook (Arnason, Hafsteinsson, & Grétarsdóttir, 2003; Hume & Bressers, 2009).

A typical letter to the deceased looked like this (it also included a brief statement of condolence to the family):

MENDIK−Bernard H. You inspired so many, but few had the unique privilege of being with you day by day for over 20 years. Your insight, wisdom, dignity and sense of fairness forever will be a part of me. Our love & warmth for Suzy, Alex, Todd, Kevin, and Laurie. We all will miss a great man. (NYT, 2001-05-31, emphasis added)

Such letters appeared in the memoria genre in the 1950s for the first time: At first, there were only two such letters, and then there were seven in the 1970s. In the 2000s, 24 such letters were counted, distributed across all four genres. Not surprisingly, almost all these letters were saturated with emotional content: expressions of love, loss, and sorrow appeared often. In addition, it was clear that a major function of such letters in the 2000s was to memorialize, such as in “His memory will live on in every time worn antique and frayed edge” (NYT, 2015-04-12). The link between memorializing and emotionality can be seen in the following announcement:

MARTIN−Ilse. Died January 7, 2002. Born Chemnitz, Germany March 1, 1911. Cherished aunt of Gudrun […] Ilse lived her life with courage, caring and loving kindness. She earned our unlimited love, respect and devotion. May the memory of her life bring warmth and comfort to those who miss her so much. Contributions in Ilse’s memory to Hospice Care Network […]. (NYT, 2002-01-08)

Our conclusion is fairly straightforward; there has been an increased expression of emotions in death announcements from the early 20th to the early 21st century. These findings are consistent with those of research conducted in the 1990s (Walter, 1996), as well as with those of more recent research (Arnason et al., 2003; Ergin, 2012), which has witnessed an increase in emotionality in contemporary death notices and obituaries.

Conclusion

Social rituals mark transitions in life (Giddens, 1991), and there is ample evidence that North American society can be characterized as lacking in grieving and mourning rituals (Granek, 2008). Rituals are devices that take something that is essentially private (grief) into the public domain, which also transforms individual experience into something more collective and social. We conclude, in line with Granek’s contention, that death announcements are rituals that are still widely available to the bereaved in modern, individualistic societies in the 21st century. In fact, Barth et al. (2014) have argued that “the practice of announcing the passing away of a person by those emotionally proximate to him or her has become a cultural universal” (p. 162). The placement of such announcements in a leading newspaper brings the private experience of grief into the public domain, even if it does so in a very limited way. De Vries and Rutherford (2004) have identified a similar trend, with the establishment of web cemeteries, as an emerging postdeath ritual to celebrate private mourning in a public space. Clearly there is a need for recognition of loss as part of the grieving process (Granek & O’Rourke, 2011). The authors of this article posit that this is the result of a need for someone to witness the event, to comfort ourselves that we are not alone in this “fateful moment” (Giddens, 1991) of bereavement.

One could argue that death notices reflect changes in the way people have described their experiences, but they are also likely to disseminate a particular cultural understanding of grief. And that understanding is steeped in this particular (North American) context, as a world of increasing emotionality. This forms part of a larger process that Fischer, Manstead, Evers, Timmers, and Valk (2004) called emotionalization, in which emotions are more frequently displayed in social settings, and social interactions are judged in terms of each other’s feelings. The authors give examples of this process in terms of television programs in which the display of emotions is the primary goal, and the rise of training programs in sport, education, and management in how to deal with one’s emotions.

We find the work of the German sociologist Norbert Elias best suited to place emotionalization in an even wider sociocultural context. In his well-known work, The Civilizing Process (1994, originally published in 1939), he argued that there are strong links between large-scale social processes (such as state formation, urbanization, and economic development) and transformations in our psychological makeup. As modern societies became more complex, the lives of individuals became increasingly intertwined and interdependent, reworking the relationships between individuals and groups, as well as processes within people. For Elias the most important change in the psychological makeup of individuals in the modern West is in the regulation of emotions and behavior. These societies require self-restraint from their members; in particular, the management and control of human feelings.

As a final thought, we would like to draw attention to the role that psychology played in the process of emotionalization. Authors like Granek (2015) and Jansz (2004) have shown how the discipline of psychology has reinforced the heightened concern with an interior life, which many have referred to as the psychologization of everyday life. The years immediately after World War 2 were particularly significant in this process, as, for example, the Veterans Administration in the United States made all members of the armed forces eligible for psychiatric or psychological assistance. This led to the explosive growth of psychology, and clinical psychology in particular, to meet the sudden demand for psychological expertise. Over time the language of psychology became so pervasive that Furedi (2004) could speak of a “therapy culture” in modern societies. Therapy in this sense refers less to a clinical technique than to a general outlook on life, in which “therapy has developed an acute concern for the monitoring and managing of inner feelings” (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985, p. 138). It is fair to say, as Abma (2004) did, that modern people live in a psychological society, where psychology provides us with new guidelines and points of reference to live our lives.

It should come as little surprise, then, that there is such a steady increase in emotionality in the way words are used in the announcements that we have studied in this article, as psychologization goes hand in hand with emotions, and the expression of emotion, as inner states taking an increasingly central place in our daily interactions. Granek (2015) summarizes this quite succinctly: “The vocabulary of grief has been thoroughly psychologized …” (p. 117), including terms such as coping, recovery, healing, denial, and grief work.

Two potential limitations of our study should be mentioned briefly. First, we argued that the NYT is a valuable resource for studies such as this one. Nevertheless, one has to acknowledge that it may provide a limited perspective on grief in the United States, and that a different data source may provide interesting differences. A report released by The Pew Research Center (2012) indicated that regular readers of the NYT tend to be younger than average, better educated, and with a higher family income. (One could point out that it is exactly this group to whom “therapy culture” appeals). This being said, one ought to be careful not to over-emphasize possible differences between readers of the NYT and readers of say newspapers in more rural areas. They all live in the broader culture we have described here, and the sociocultural context identified by Elias (1994) influences them all.

Second, we sampled death notices from a very long time span, which necessitated at least some periodization. The study thus provides four snapshots over time, rather than one continuous timeline of development. The fact that our findings are corroborated rather well by findings from other studies cited gives us confidence in the reliability of the patterns we identified. Further research could choose to examine different time periods, to check how robust the patterns are, or could attempt to provide a more detailed picture of a shorter time period, such as in Ergin’s (2010, 2012) studies, for example. In addition, studies of the differences in the way death announcements are used and formulated in different countries could give us further insight into cultural conventions concerning issues of life and death, and how these conventions shift over time. In this regard, the use of mourning rituals via virtual mourning portals or other social media may be particularly informative. Cesare and Branstad (2018) found that Twitter is widening the scope of death and mourning rituals, which seems to indicate that we are only at the beginnings of this type of experience and research into it.

Footnotes

Acknowledgment

This article was language edited by a freelance language editor, Anthony Sparg.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work is supported partly by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant No. 85365). The grant holder acknowledges that opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in any publications generated by the NRF supported research are that of the author, and the NRF accepts no liability whatsoever in this regard.

Author Biographies

Paul Brusser holds a Bachelors of Social Science (Honours) specialising in Psychology from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is currently working in the field of e-learning and pursuing a career in clinical psychology.

Johann Louw is professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and has published widely on the history of psychology.

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