An OSINT Lesson in Grief
And the limits of knowing a person
My grandmother died six days ago.
Given she was 94 years old, it was both expected and not. Expected because that’s a perfectly reasonable age to die. Unexpected because she rarely did things reasonably. So she did not go gently, and she did not go quietly, but she did go, and I’ll make my peace with that.
I learned long ago that grief does funny things to our memories. We tend to evangelize people once they’re gone. We stand at podiums, and we write obituaries, and we tell nice and neat stories of entire lives that were only on occasion nice and neat. At some point, we decided that was polite or good, or the right thing to do, and the tradition carried on.
My grandmother was charming and nurturing. She loved with a depth that I wish all people could experience. She picked up the phone whenever you called, and she listened. Her hugs could’ve been a therapy all their own. She was also challenging. She was shamelessly demanding and had unfathomable expectations of the people around her. When she felt it was warranted, she could be downright mean and she did not mince words when it came to her girls, of which I was one. She kept a trained eye on our weight and always asked me to curl my hair because straight hair makes me look cheap.
She was not uniquely detestable or uniquely agreeable. She was a person with an interesting psychology, an enviable wit, and I adored her sheer humanity.
What a force.
The end was not tidy, and it was not nice, and I resented that it couldn’t be gentler. It wasn’t her fault. She was sick and delirious, and agitated, as anyone would be. I vented to my parents, and then, unceremoniously, during a chilling snowstorm, she died.
I drank wine with my mom a few days later, and she said to me, “You know, it wasn’t easy, so we had to say that out loud, but it doesn’t erase that we loved her so much and we will miss her.”
I already knew that, but it’s one of those things you have to say out loud anyway.
To me, the deepest truth is that truth itself rarely applies to people.
Writing the obituary of someone you feel you know so deeply is a humbling experience. In chronological order, I made quick notes of her life and swiftly realized my story was riddled with blanks. Where had she lived after college? How long did she even stay in the teaching profession? Did she start her then-lifelong career before or after my dad was born? Did she divorce my grandfather the year my sister was born or the year I was born? I realized I never knew her father’s name. He died before my father was born, and she only called him “daddy.”
I knew it was likely futile, but I opened Ancestry, and then local archives, and I dug for her name and then other names. I looked for the date on a cookbook that had a graduation photo shoved in the back to see if they might match. I texted a third cousin with a knack for scrapbooking by date. Justin is going to digitize the VHS from her retirement party, so maybe I’ll figure out when she started her decades-long role there and if she had an official title rather than “the Mrs Roper of banking.” I tracked down a marriage license. Still, there were many blanks. I looked into the corner of the walls to see if the beige would force an answer out of obscurity.
For one relieving second, I thought to myself, “Well, fuck, I’ll just call her.”
Unfortunately, she’s still dead, so that didn’t work.
I wrote the story as best as I could and took comfort in knowing that anyone who could meaningfully fact-check me is currently welcoming her in the great beyond and will not be seated at her funeral to mention it.
This is not a cautionary tale of timelines or record keeping; it’s a matter of people.
Earlier this year, I dug into the investigation of the death of a woman named Ann, who was born a few months before my grandmother. Her life was cut significantly shorter, but, for a time, they were the same age in the same city, divorcees with sons, looking for purpose and meaning.
Oftentimes, when you spend a long time in an investigation in the way that I do, less data and more people, you develop a sense of understanding or closeness. Spending countless hours attempting to know someone may, after all, result in a feeling that you know someone.
With Ann, I never felt I knew her. I care about her story and her memory, but I never felt I could say I understood much, if anything, about her. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. In fact, if I were to tell you that I understood someone I had never met, you should be wary of me. But there was a uniqueness to my experience.
The way we investigate deaths at Permanent Record has much more to do with the intricate details of how that death happened, and not so much with the people who died. Sure, understanding how someone lived their life can be useful in understanding how they died, but whether or not they believed in a God, how they took their coffee, what it looked like when they expressed their love, their favourite book, or their most painful memory are not often details we need while analyzing CCTV or body cam footage.
As a journalist, I often work with the living. When the subject is not alive, I’ve usually come to that story because, well, there is a story. You have digital footprints to work with, social media accounts, and living connections who want to tell you what they know about this person. You take all of these details and create a version of this person that lives and breathes in your mind. I’ve done it before, and it’s come with the relentless pursuit of seemingly meaningless details and people who want to talk.
I didn’t have that with Ann. That was the uniqueness. She had been gone so long that a digital footprint was non-existent. Most of the people who could genuinely speak to her character were also gone or had become too vulnerable in old age to interview with everyone’s integrity intact. The people we were able to speak to were either relatively fringe acquaintances or people who did consider themselves close, but only for a rather short period in the scope of an entire life.
There was no real end to what I was willing to try, but you can’t manifest results out of nothing. So, I knew what I knew, which wasn’t much. She was a woman and a mother who had lived and died, and in between explored some interesting beliefs. That’s about all I can say for certain. Human testimony was conflicting. To some, she was cold and distant. To others, she was the warmest guiding light.
This is, of course, not a unique experience when getting to the core of a person. That core can often be murky. The deepest truth is that truth itself rarely applies to people.
The tension with this in our work is that we are often asked, even indirectly, to make judgment calls about who people are and why they do what they do. Sometimes, it’s easy to shrug and say, “I don’t truly know.” Other times, it is incredibly tempting to take the culmination of what you know and make assertions with conviction. Particularly when we’re talking about someone who did an objectively bad thing, and we’re looking for something or someone to blame.
But the reality is always going to be that whether it’s a victim or a perpetrator, or it’s your friend, or my grandmother, it’s simply perspective. Clinically, the same subject produces different conclusions from different observers. Philosophically, no one is one thing long enough to be objectively defined.
We can stack our sources and our materials to try to get to a kernel, and even then, we’ll have to reconcile the gap between what we see and what is “true”. Obituaries, for example. Perhaps it was written by a well-meaning grandchild with endless memories but a terrible sense of dates and numbers, and thoughts clouded by the stink of hospital and death.
Wherever my grandmother is right now, or wherever she is not, I hope she knows that whatever I write or say about her, I know that she was so much more than that. She was much bigger than who she was to me.
Oh, and if you have a shitty husband, feel free to leave him today. Verna would’ve wanted that.