A Toronto Star column last weekend posed a difficult question: when people with dark, abusive histories die, how frank should their families be about it?
Columnist Cathrin Bradbury interviewed an Ontario woman whose death notice for her father announced that "the abusive, narcissistic absentee father/husband/brother/son finally kicked the bucket."
"Death can be redemptive, I believe that, but when they choose not to find meaning themselves, to stay terrible to the end, should we not write them as they lived — can we give that at least to the unrepentant dead?," Bradbury asked.
Set against that is the long tradition of not speaking ill of the dead, an instruction that dates back to at least 600 B.C.
However, death notices in our society are largely prepared by family members, and if they endured decades of abuse from the recently departed, then it isn't surprising if many of them will want to be open about saying so when the time comes.
Some 1,990 of you had your say in a poll this week. The results are almost perfectly split:
NHL star Bobby Hull's death in January raised somewhat similar issues (but also differences, in that Hull was a public figure.)
Hull's private life was a horror story of domestic abuse — tellingly, his daughter Michelle became a lawyer specializing in family violence cases after witnessing her father's treatment of her mother — and when he died, sports journalism culture seemed to struggle with how to present his life.
One extreme was the Peterborough Examiner, which cautiously allowed toward the end of a nostalgic 600-word column that "Bob’s off-ice incidents were not what hockey fans expected from their idols," and quickly moved on.
The other extreme was Deadspin, which argued that "Hull was an unremorseful puke-stain of a human being. That is hardly up for debate."
The Globe and Mail took out the trash, as it were, in the second-last paragraph of an otherwise adoring obituary, in which it quickly conceded that he had suspended one of his wives from a balcony, threatened her with a loaded shotgun on another occasion, and was estranged from all five of his children. The Canadian Press took a similar approach.
Sometimes our polls show a cultural divide between northern and southern Ontario, but not in this case.
There was a noticeable divide by sex ...
... and also by age, with younger readers more open to the abrasive, truthful approach (though not by a very large margin):