The Death Issue

Art by Zeke Barbaro / Getty Images

We decided to meet on the rooftop and I don’t know why. It was cold and cloudy, and I got horribly sunburned anyway. I sat next to the other crime reporter at the daily newspaper. Our two editors sat across the table from us.

We, the young reporters, had told our bosses: there’s just too much tragedy to cover in a day. We needed some parameters. So we started measuring hypothetical tragedies. Did we really have to cover every fatal accident? No, but surely if the driver was pregnant. What about wildfires? There were too many. We could measure the horror in deaths or houses destroyed. We threw out numbers that would merit a story. It was so bleak I laughed.

For better or worse, covering tragedy is a lot of what journalists do. Jackknifed trucks and gunshots – shocking situations. At the Chronicle, we don’t track those events. We mostly focus on deaths tied to injustice. Still, we miss a lot of the basics. Sometimes it seems like the most universal experiences are the most taboo. For this death issue, we wanted to focus on relatively normal deaths. I hope these stories remind you that we’re all in this together.