Taking a tender approach when life meets death

A group of six, perhaps seven, is huddled around a computer at Director of Photography Jeff Knox's desk in the middle of the newsroom. They are a mix of managers, reporters, copy editors and employees from other departments, and they are watching a video. The video is for a story we'd been working on about a volunteer organization that photographs mothers with their stillborn babies. It ends.

"So what do you think?" Knox asks. "Can we run this? Should we run this?"

It is perhaps not so remarkable that everyone in the group agrees that the story is powerful and important, but the curious detail that sticks with me now many weeks after that meeting is how many in the group had personal, direct experience with the issue at the heart of the story. This was a randomly selected set of individuals, deliberately chosen to reflect a broad cross section of ages, interests and approaches to news. Yet, nearly every one could draw on firsthand experience with a close friend or family member who had undergone the trauma of losing a child at birth.

Some choked back tears as they described why they thought this was an important story to share. All agreed that while the subject matter seemed morbid at first, the story itself and the various key elements of it - the mother, the child, the volunteer photographer, the nurse, the very setting of a hospital birthing room - all combined to create a tender, moving report.

Death, unfortunately, is a central figure in the collection of stories and pictures that a daily newspaper comprises. It is captured in the horror of a family tragedy. It flows out of the shock of an airplane crash. It surges in tales of murder on the street and reports of random disaster on the highway. It even has its own section in the obituary columns, where its faces appear every day in every age, shape and color that attends the human form.

Yet, it can be a very troubling subject to approach openly, especially in that most innocent and most fundamental bond between a mother and her child.

In whatever form, the Daily Herald maintains some fairly strict standards about how it is to be portrayed. We do not as rule carry pictures of dead bodies. Except in rare, unavoidable circumstances, such as the heartbreaking case in Arlington Heights this week, we do not report on suicides. We strive not to sensationalize murder, killing or even accidental death, and we avoid portrayals that might lead someone to risk his life or hurt himself appearing to seem heroic in death.

But that doesn't mean the topic is far from our minds, our hearts or our pages. In this case, editors were naturally unsure of whether to pursue the story at all, wondering how it could be played in a way that was not indulgent, sensationalistic or simply morbid. But we came around in much the way that Kristin Cashmore, a photographer we included in the story, described as happening often with this subject.

"I think until you understand what it means to the parents, it will be hard for you to (explain this effort)," she says in our Web video. "You hear parents all the time talk about how important that was. And going back to my initial contact with a family who had lost a child, even though that photograph that was on their wall was not the greatest quality, it was golden. If there was a fire in that house, they're going after that photo."

It's a life-affirming realization, really. One that somehow helps us better understand what it means to be and have a family. That's what the editors who watched the video around Jeff Knox's desk discovered. It's what videographer Mark Welsh and reporter Eric Peterson ultimately showed in their work, which ran online and in print earlier this week. We hope it's what you found as well.

Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor.