Six decades on, death knocks remain vivid memories

The hardest assignment faced by many journalists is the death knock, knowing that the face on the other side of the door will be streaked with grief at the loss of someone close.

Twice last week I was reminded of the strain of such assignments and the indelible memories they leave on reporters.

The first trigger was the Texas floods in which the bodies of 130 people have been recovered and a further 160 remain missing. Watching interviews with the families of victims was harrowing: Anguished faces and tremulous voices were interspersed with images of joyful eight-year-old girl campers and their pretty teenage counsellors. All gone.

The second was the front page of Saturday’s Waikato Times. It was devoted to a story about an 18-year-old apprentice jockey who died when his dirt bike and a car collided at a Hamilton intersection. In it, his mother spoke of a life of determination and promise cut tragically short. Reporter Avina Vidyadharan had clearly let the woman unburden her grief, speaking of her son’s life, attributes and achievements along with the premonition she had that he had died.

I needed no further reminders, but a Facebook post of a Guardian story of Palestinian children killed in Israeli airstrikes renewed images of the unutterable tragedy that has played out since the government of Benjamin Netanyahu exacted from innocent civilians an awful and unremitting revenge for the Hamas attack on an Israeli music festival last October. Those reporting it are confronted every day by grief at every level, none more so than the journalist covering the story of a doctor who lost nine of her 10 children.

I have vivid recollections of my own experiences as a reporter asking the bereaved to share personal and sometimes intimate recollections of someone suddenly removed from life. The one that is seared into my memory has been there for almost six decades.

It was not one memory, but three that were inextricably linked by tragedy.

I had been a journalist for little more than a year when I was told to “go and interview the widows” of three men who had died in a maritime disaster. What I experienced ran a spectrum of human emotion.

I knocked on the door of the first house, a well-maintained property in one of Auckland’s better suburbs. The woman who invited me in was a model of contained emotion and quiet dignity, literally putting on a brave face for the sake of others. She spoke warmly about her husband, but her immediate concern was for the dependents of his shipmates.

The second woman lived in a rented flat and, when she answered my knock, beside her was an infant in a pram. I told her who I was and asked if I could talk about her husband. She broke down and clung to me. She knew no-one in Auckland who could share her grief. Then, with tears welling in her eyes, she talked about the short time she and her husband had had together and the uncertainty of the future for her and her baby.

My third interview was in an inner city boarding house. I knocked on the apartment door and it was answered by a woman wearing a dressing gown and obviously little else. As I finished telling the recently widowed lady who I was, a male voice came from the bedroom: “I don’t care who it is, tell him to fuck off”. The door closed.

I was emotionally drained by the end of that day but infinitely wiser about the multifarious nature of the human condition.

In the years that followed there were other death knocks relating to people who had died of natural causes, in accidents, or as the victims of crime. I never looked forward to such assignments, but I learned to exercise extra care with the families of murder victims, who were particularly traumatised by the nature of their loss.

Assigned to cover the funeral of the victim of a grisly murder, I opted to report only what was said in the service and did not attempt to interview any of her family. I imagined a situation where our positions were reversed, and judged a request for an interview to be an unwarranted intrusion.

I was no different to any of my colleagues. Every journalist I knew was mindful of the responsibilities they had when intruding on grief. In this country, at least, the image of the hard-bitten reporter who didn’t give a damn for the feelings of the bereaved was a fiction.

Nothing has changed. Today’s reporters are acutely aware of the requirements to act appropriately in situations involving grief. Editorial codes of conduct continue to contain a public interest test before any intrusion on the privacy that people value highly when they are mourning a loss.

Yet I may be a little hasty in saying nothing has changed.

I do not believe reporters have become less concerned for the feelings of the bereaved. However, I do think the public’s thresholds and expectations may be changing as a result of social media.

Many use social media in the belief they are communicating with select groups of relatives, friends, and acquaintances. Their posts and messages often reflect personal and sometimes deepest feelings. However, it is the nature of these services to promote the extension of engagement beyond what began as effectively a copy of existing personal networks. In other words, the more connections, the better. Users wind up sharing their feelings across a much broader spectrum than in the past, and the expectation of such openness grows accordingly.

I can’t answer this question with any authority, but it is worth asking: Do we now expect people to give voice their grief?

We now see Facebook and Instagram quotes included in media reports following sudden deaths. For example, in a report of the murder of a man outside a Knightsbridge hotel last week, Facebook was the source of the London’s Daily Mirror’s quotes from his mother. She posted a photograph of the victim along with the words “Everyone in your life will have a last day with you, and you won’t even know when it will be. Cherish them before it’s too late. Please. I want him back.” His sister also posted on social media and was duly quoted in news stories.

Such use of social media for proactive displays of grief may have the effect of increasing public expectation that the veil will be pushed back.

It may be part of a wider societal change, one that has seen us become more prurient. We want to see behind the curtains not because it is in the public interest but simply because it is interesting.

Journalists must resist falling into that trap. The public interest test justifying respectful intrusion into grief is right and proper. There has to be a very good reason for doing so.

Which brings us back to Saturday’s Waikato Times. Why did the newspaper devote its entire from page to a traffic accident? It did so because, following his death, Ngakau Hailey had been the subject of unwarranted social media speculation and criticism. Hamilton has been plagued by packs of marauding bike riders.It was assumed the bike he was riding had been stolen, and he was riding recklessly.

His mother, Kate Rochelle, emerged from her grief to set the record straight. He had paid $8500 for his bike, used a temporary helmet while waiting for a specialised motocross model, was a careful driver, did not drink or take drugs, had a record of sporting and personal achievement, and had had tributes paid by horse trainers and jockeys from around New Zealand since his death.

The care journalists are expected to exercise in dealing with grief does not, it seems, extend to idiots let loose on social media.