I have recently been gifted some Globe and Mails to complement our daily print copies of the Toronto Star. How anyone starts their morning without a coffee and newsprinty fingers is a mystery to me.
Today, I was (morbidly?) delighted to find a featured obituary for Al Raine, ski industry legend, husband of Canadian ski hero Nancy Greene and the only mayor the ski town of Sun Peaks has ever had.
I was delighted, in part, not because Mr. Raine had passed, but because Sun Peaks is where I formally started my career and met my husband.
It's not mentioned in the news a lot, being dwarfed by Whistler, but it's a wonderful ski town and I was there in its early days. I even worked at the hotel that Al and Nancy ran there, for the hardest three weeks of my life, as a housekeeper. I was also delighted to catch up on Mr. Raine's bio, with which I realized I wasn't very familiar.
If it were not for the back-page obit and its inviting layout, I would not have known that Mr. Raine passed, nor been able to experience the rush of nostalgia and excitement I was able to this morning. Professional obits are the most interesting example of a bio, I think, typically written with a kind hand but highlighting the most interesting details of a person's life from the distance of their death. They always make me reflect on aspects of my own life and sometimes reflect on what would be included in my own,
They are a pillar of newspaper writing and a poigniant and important reason for newspapers to continue to exist. The Globe does them especially well.
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