The number one question people ask when they hear someone has
died is how? How did they die? What was the cause? We saw that
a few months ago when Naomi Judd died, the superstar
country singer. Her daughters Wynonna and Ashley Judd put out
a statement saying quote, we lost our beautiful mother to
the disease of mental illness. And immediately fans started
asking what does that mean? We also hear this when a young
person dies. Say in their 20s and the family announces they
died of natural causes. And people are like, what do you
mean natural causes? How does a young person naturally die?
What aren't you telling us? Today, we're going to answer
those questions. What is up with those confusing causes of
death? In this episode of Immortalized.
I'm Stephen Segal from Legacy.com the world's largest
network of obituaries. And I'm Linnea Crowther, Legacy's news
editor and lead obituary writer. So, every week, we
publish obituaries and video tributes to public figures
whose death made headlines and every week, we get questions
from our audience here at Legacy wanting more information
about how exactly someone died. I get it. Sometimes, our news
obituaries don't list the cause of death at all and people find
that frustrating. So, here's the first important fact to
understand. An obituary is not a medical document or a legal
document or a government document. It's not the death
certificate. No, the death certificate is a state
government record that gets filled out by a medical
professional after they examine the body and I think a lot of
people don't realize that that has nothing to do with the
obituary. The obituary is a story, a memorial to the
person's life to mark the occasion of their death. And it's not
written by the authorities. No, if the person who died was a
private citizen, then their family writes the obituary
and what they put in it is whatever they're comfortable
sharing with the public. That might be a whole lot of details
about the deceased person's life or it might be just the
very basic facts of where they lived and who their survivors
are, either way it's entirely up to the family. And that's
most obituaries. But the other kind probably get talked about
more. Yes, because the other kind are obituaries for public
figures. And that includes celebrities, government
officials, people who made news headlines during their lives.
So their deaths are also considered to be a matter of
public notability. So when the person who died was a public
figure. Then the first obituary that gets published
is probably going to be a news story reported by local
journalists. Because when someone well-known dies, it's news. And
in that case, what the obituary includes is going to be
whatever the reporter is able to officially confirm by
talking to the person's family or their representative or
sometimes the local authorities. If the
circumstances of the death would call for the authorities
to be involved. Which they usually only are if the death
was unexpected. If someone was sick and being treated by
doctors and nurses and they died, there's nothing to investigate.
All of that is to say, as far as obituaries written by
reporters go, if a cause of death has been announced, we
tell you because we know that that fact, how they died is one
important part of their life story. But sometimes, that
information just isn't available yet. Right, and there
are a few reasons for that, to start with, sometimes when a
person dies, the exact cause might not be obvious right
away. That's why there are autopsies to try to determine
that cause when there isn't a really obvious injury or a
known illness. So those are deaths that are probably going
to be reported with no cause of death listed at least
initially. There was a case like that that came up in the
news not too long ago. A young man from Palm Beach, Florida,
named Damon Weaver, died last May at the age of 23.
Damon Weaver had made national news a decade before that when
he was just 11 years old and he became the youngest person ever
to interview a sitting president of the United States.
He interviewed President Obama for his elementary school's news
show. It was covered as a big deal when it happened. So, 12
years later, when Damon Weaver died, the news media considered
him a public figure and reported on it and the cause of
death was stated as two words that some people find very
frustrating. Natural causes. That's right and since Weaver
was only 23 years old, that raised a lot of eyebrows. Here
at Legacy, we got a whole lot of comments on our Facebook
post with his obituary and on our video news tribute with
people basic asking, how on earth can it be natural for
somebody to die at the age of 23? Which is an
honest question, right? When you think of someone dying of
natural causes, the image you get is more like a very elderly
person passing away peacefully in their sleep. Not a young
adult dying way before their time. Exactly, it just seems
weird to people and our commenters on Facebook and
YouTube really questioned it a lot. Saying things like, there
is nothing natural about dying at 23 and suggesting that there was
something suspicious going on. But there's something that
people don't realize. And that's that natural causes does
not mean dying of old age. Because there's not really any
such thing as dying of old age. There's always some specific
reason somebody's body stops working. And yes a lot of times
that's because things wear out when you're old but old age is
the context not the cause. So it turns out that what natural
causes really means is that the cause was something internal to
the person. So it wasn't a car accident or a suicide or a drug
overdose or a murder. Any illness, any internal health
condition falls under the broad range of natural causes.
Whether it's cancer or a heart problem, or diabetes, or a brain
aneurysm, these are all natural causes. And when a younger
person dies of natural causes, just like when a younger person
dies for any reason before they've grown old, it's
upsetting. Their family is sad, they're grieving. So reason the
family often announces the death a little vaguely at first
as just natural causes instead of being more specific is that
they just may not want to be forced to dwell on the sad
details right now. Their loss is painful enough as it is. And
when that young person was famous, you know, imagine how
weird it has to be to have a celebrity in your family in the
first place. And then how big an invasion of privacy it must
be when they die. And everybody is hounding the family
demanding all the details. I'm not at all surprised that some
families just want to say he was sick, okay? Stop bothering us.
And in some cases, they're just never going to release the
exact cause of death and that's their right. On the other hand,
there are some cases where the family themselves just don't
know the exact medical cause yet. Sometimes, it clearly
wasn't a violent death and there's no indication of any
drug overdose but an autopsy is going to be needed to determine
the specific cause. That was what happened with Damon
Weaver. It was several months later that the results of an
autopsy were released and we learned that he had died of
vaso-occlusive crisis. Which is a problem with blood flow that
stems from sickle cell anemia. So, natural causes was totally
valid even if it seems confusing when you don't know
all the details. We really get so many questions very
frequently whenever we report that someone's death was due to
natural causes. When the fashion designer Thierry Mugler
died back in January, it was reported as due to natural
causes and that's still his official cause of death. He was
73 so he wasn't terribly young but still we had
comments like natural causes at 73 I don't believe
that and it makes you suspect anything else they say. Part of
that is that some people don't trust the news media in the
first place. But also people know that in regular local
obituaries for non celebrities there's a long tradition of
families using euphemisms to avoid painful topics. Yes we
see that with things like suicide or drug overdose. When
a private citizen dies from a self-inflicted cause like that
and their family writes the obituary, they may use
gentler language like died suddenly or went to a better
place instead of saying the word suicide. It is absolutely
hard to talk about it if someone you love has taken
their own life. So using those vaguer terms is a way to cushion
that harsh reality. Journalists don't choose to use euphemisms
like that but many families definitely do. In any case, for
our part doing obituary news reporting at Legacy, one thing
that's an absolute professional standard is we have to make
sure we don't write anything that's not true. We're not in
the business of maybe. That's why sometimes you'll see a
report from us that does not include a specific cause of
death. Because we can't speculate about the cause when
all that's out there are rumors. Which brings us back to
a story we mentioned at the beginning of the show. When
Naomi died, her family announced, quote, we lost our
beautiful mother to the disease of mental illness. And a lot of
people immediately started guessing that she had died by
suicide. Yes, they did and I'm not surprised by that. It
seemed like a logical conclusion to make from that
statement. And then one major news magazine reported that
anonymous sources had confirmed to them that it was suicide.
And a whole bunch of other news sites then cited that one
magazine as confirmation. But you know, for us at Legacy,
somebody else's anonymous sources are not good enough. It
has to be on the record, either from the family or the funeral
home or local authorities. And in this case, it was almost two
weeks later before Naomi's daughter Ashley reluctantly
revealed that her mother had taken her own life. And that
was the point when we updated the Legacy obituary. Right. I
think there were some people who assumed we were trying to
sugarcoat it by referring simply to mental illness in our
obituary. When in fact, we were just waiting to be able to
report responsibly that an official source was on the
record. I don't think we ever shy away from including an
established cause of death in our obituaries. No, we don't. If
it was suicide, drug overdose, murder, as long as there is
credible reporting there to back it up, we tell the truth
when that truth is available to be told. Are there any other
causes of death that you've seen questions about in our
comment sections? Well, in the past couple years, there has
been some debate over what counts as a COVID death. That's
just another example where as with any other cause of death,
we're careful not to speculate but to report what is actually
confirmed on the record. If people on the internet are
saying, well, that person was in the hospital with COVID at
some point before their death but neither the family nor the
authorities have attributed the death to COVID, then we can't
state it was the cause of death because maybe isn't a fact. And
then on the other hand if the official announcement is that
someone died of COVID then that's what we're going to
report. People also seem to get a little suspicious when a
younger person dies of a heart attack or stroke. You know Luke
Perry died of a stroke back in 2019 and he was only 52 and it
raised some eyebrows. It was shocking but it happens. I know
someone who had a stroke even younger than that. And her
family's quick response was what saved her. We also reported
several deaths from heart attacks last year. A few men in
their 50s who died fairly close together and it had some
commenters saying hmm. It is certainly a young age to die of
a heart attack but it's not at all unheard of. I know we've
talked about this idea in previous episodes. We humans
really have a tendency to look for patterns in things. So,
when you see three or four prominent people dying of the
same thing over the course of a month or two, you might say, ah-ha
look at the pattern. When it's more likely just an unfortunate
coincidence because there were surely a lot more people than
those three or four who died young of a heart attack in
those months. We just happened to hear about those because
they were well-known people. Yeah, if you go back to the
episode we did earlier this year when we looked at some
statistics about the news obits we wrote in 2021,
we talked about that desire to see patterns in the obituary pages.
It's just like how people insist that celebrity deaths
come in threes. So when we have two big deaths close together,
they're just waiting for that other shoe to drop. Which I
suppose it inevitably will eventually. That doesn't mean
those deaths happened close together because of any shared
cause. It just means that life and death are going on like
they always do. On that note, that's our show for today.
Thank you to my co-host Linnea Crowther and to our producer,
John Maxwell. Thank you also to Legacy.com, where any family
can place an obituary online and in their local newspaper in
honor of a loved one's memory. Just visit Legacy.com and
choose your local community. To hear more life stories like
these, you can subscribe to Immortalized on your favorite
podcast app. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel, just
look up Legacy.com on YouTube and if you're on Facebook, you
can follow Legacy.com there for daily updates. Thanks for
listening.