You know the inevitabilities of modern life: death, taxes, and rival organizations of newspaper obituarists.
For almost a decade, the International Association of Obituarists has been the feature writers' dream. Lionized in The New Yorker, featured in Marilyn Johnson's 2006 book, "The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries," the IAO was the brainchild of a good ol' Texas gal named Carolyn Gilbert, who just plain loved reading obits. A public policy consultant, Gilbert managed to lure a motley crew of deadbeat writers to Nowheresville, USA - Las Vegas, N.M., where parts of "No Country for Old Men" were filmed - for several years running to discuss the finer points of the newspaperperson's dark art.
"It was such a hangdog profession, it was almost perverse to exalt it," says author Johnson, who has been to IAO meetings. "The whole thing was kind of a joke to Carolyn and her drinking buddies. To their amazement, people started attending. She helped create a scene in which it was OK to celebrate the obituary."
Most death hacks are grateful to Gilbert for putting them on the map. But she started siting IAO conferences in other oddball venues - Bath, England; Alfred, N.Y. - and featuring oddball guests. Several writers recall the unexplained presence of Texas "apron archaeologist" EllynAnne Geisel on one IAO program as the beginning of some serious disenchantment. Last year, "her closing speaker was someone she met in the bar the night before," says the Toronto Globe and Mail's obituaries editor Colin Haskin. "That was the tenor of the whole shooting match. It was a little wiggy."
Haskin and two colleagues suggested holding this year's 10th anniversary conference in Toronto, which a friend of mine calls "a great obit town," with two major papers, the Globe and Mail, and the Star. It is also worth noting that, unlike mini-Las Vegas and Alfred, Toronto has an airport.
In a nutshell, the professional writers wanted the obits conference to be more like a real journalists' convention, i.e. boring. No more London Daily Telegraph scribes showing up in 10-gallon hats and swilling 40-ounce margaritas; no more green-painted hearses pulling up in front of Las Vegas's Plaza Hotel. The planned Toronto death-in was to include instructional workshops, and hoped to lure prestigious speakers like Margaret Atwood and Canada's more talented version of Alex Beam - Mark Steyn. For a while, Gilbert sent Haskin e-mails approving of his high-profile speakers: "We have tried with the former NYT obits editor but could never send him enough whiskey!"
Things became testy when Haskin & Co. demanded full control of the conference. "You must take a backseat entirely and allow us to run everything," Haskin e-mailed Gilbert. "You must turn everything over to us. In other words, for the 10th conference, you must give up all control, including the website, finances, attendance, fees, list of speakers etc." "The tenth anniversary conference," he wrote, "cannot proceed in the same manner as those in the past."
"I am gobsmacked with your comments and innuendo," Gilbert wrote back." "I am bewildered by your repeated demand for 'control.' " Relations between the two deteriorated even further, with Gilbert at one point offering to sell Haskin the rights to the obituaries conference for $200,000. "It was not a serious offer," she says now.
The planned Toronto conference expired late last fall, and a rival obituarists guild, the Society of Professional Obituary Writers, sprang up to supplant Gilbert's IAO. SPOW held a workshop in Portland, Ore., last month, and is planning a full-dress obituarists conference next year in Charlotte, N.C. "The IAO isn't really representative of what we are as a profession," says Cleveland Plain Dealer obituarist Alana Baranick, an interim board member of SPOW. "We have outgrown them. We will still enjoy going to their conference because they're so much fun."
A somewhat embattled Gilbert says, "I don't feel that there is a competition. The purposes of the two organizations are different." She calls SPOW a "subset" of the IAO.
And don't start reading the last rites for the IAO. Instead of in Toronto, the association will celebrate its 10th anniversary in . . . Las Vegas, N.M., June 12-14. "The faithful," as Gilbert calls them, will again take over the Plaza Hotel, and if you book now, you may be able to reserve the room where "No Country for Old Men" baddie Javier Bardem blew Woody Harrelson to kingdom come.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.
