Twenty years

The funeral was twenty years ago tomorrow.

PUBLICATION: National Post

DATE: 2006.07.27

PAGE: A16

COLUMN: Warren Kinsella

SOURCE: National Post

Close encounters with the ultimate tragedy

One hundred lifetimes ago, I was a student at Carleton University's School of Journalism,

slouched at the back of a classroom, listening to a professor named Brian Nolan talking about

death.

As journalists, he said, we would be obliged -- more than we knew, more than we liked -- to write

about death. How it always comes too swiftly, and how unready we always are for its arrival. How

it is unspeakably cruel. But that how, as journalists -- as writers -- we are obligated to document

its comings and goings.

Most of my classmates were in their late teens or early twenties, and -- like most of them -- I

considered myself immortal and unaffected by death. So I accordingly could not then conceive

that I would ever be overly preoccupied with death. Dreary old obits would be someone else's

beat.

And then Nolan -- a former ABC-TV producer and the author of acclaimed books -- told a story

whose telling I clearly remember now, so many years later. He told of how, as a cub reporter, he

was assigned to write about the death of a child. He told how he acquired all of the requisite

information from the police, and the coroner and from witnesses. And Nolan told us how he

dithered and delayed in obtaining the last thing that the story required: a photo of the child.

Eventually, following repeated requests and demands by his editor, Nolan observed his feet -- as

heavy as concrete -- walking up to the grieving family's front door. He had barely knocked on the

door, readying himself to intrude on the grief of strangers, when the father of the child was

standing before him. He handed over a photograph. "We've been waiting for you," the father said.

The photo contained the smiling face of the dead child.

Death seems to have been with us more than usual in this summer of 2006. On the other side of

the world, in the Middle East, families on both sides of the divide have been obliged to bury their

children. Journalists, meanwhile, have been pressed into the grim service of writing about it. Their

dispatches, replete with statistics, convey some of the immensity of war's horror, but none as

much as the story or photograph that captures a child's face, or that of a bereaved parent.

Here at home, too, death's presence is too pervasive -- and too inconsistent with the usual

insignia of summer, such as barbecues and swimming with your friends. Our soldiers in

Afghanistan, heroes all: Just this weekend, Cpl. Francisco Gomez and Cpl. Jason Warren were

killed. And then, the weekend before, two other heroes -- RCMP Constables Marc Bourdages and

Robin Cameron -- succumbed to gunshot wounds.

At her funeral, Cameron's 11-year-old daughter, Shayne, read these words aloud, and left many

of us crying in the process: "Dear mother dearest, the best person in my life, I'm writing this very

moment when you're going away. I'm thinking this is a nightmare but why won't I wake up? I'm

saying this right now, with all my heart, that I love you. You'll be with me wherever I go, whatever

I do in life, and in my prayers.

"I love you so much. You are my world."

In the dolour of this summer, it is easy to regard journalists as unaffected and uncaring about the

death that is seemingly all around. But that would be unfair. The writers bear one of the greatestburdens of all: They must tell death's story in a compelling way, in a human way, but they must

not choose sides.

I thought of that -- and Brian Nolan's cautionary tale -- on Monday morning when I read this very

short story in the Ottawa Citizen, where I used to work as a cops reporter, writing not infrequently

about death.

"A 17-year-old male from the Ottawa area was killed in a single-car crash near Rideau Ferry on

Saturday night. According to the Ontario Provincial Police, the teen was driving south on Old

Kingston Road, just south of Rideau Ferry, about 90 kilometres southwest of downtown Ottawa,

when his car went off the road and hit a small brick building that is part of a church.

"The young man, who has not been identified by police, was the only person in the car. He died

at the scene. Nobody else was hurt in the crash, which took place about 11:30 p.m."

That young man, that 17-year-old boy, was our nephew, an only child. He was a remarkable,

extraordinary person, and all of the world is diminished by his passing, even if the world does not

know it yet. As it is, every day, by all of the others who slip away.

Had the reporter obtained his photograph, he or she would have seen a young man, full of life

and life's promise, now gone from us too soon.

- Warren Kinsella blogs for the Post and at www.warrekinsella.com.