It's a bad introduction to hand you a plot thread that's never properly woven in to the work that follows.
I think it's a way more compelling than a more straightforward alternative. It hooks you from the start, because you want to know why he couldn't write about her, and the explanation doesn't need to be explicitly stated. Reading the article makes it clear how much he loved her and how painful this has been. Spelling it out explicitly would just detract from the story - he wants to focus on her, not his own pain.
Again, I knew what it was referencing. That's not sufficient for a good title.
> It hooks you from the start, because you want to know why he couldn't write about her, and the explanation doesn't need to be explicitly stated. Reading the article makes it clear how much he loved her and how painful this has been. Spelling it out explicitly would just detract from the story - he wants to focus on her, not his own pain.
That was obvious from the very start! The article doesn't slowly and implicitly build an understanding of that. It's something you know from the very first sentence, static and unchanging.
It's not a bad article. It does slowly build a detailed and emotional understanding of the relationship. But none of that development gives any more insight into why he couldn't write. It's just a broad stroke of a background detail as far as the article itself is concerned. The details of that personal journey are left untold.
> Spelling it out explicitly would just detract from the story - he wants to focus on her, not his own pain.
I'm definitely not saying he should be spelling it out in the article devoted to the story of his wife. I'm saying that the title is wrong. He could write about his own pain later, if he wanted to. And the title would be appropriate for that article, not this one.
It serves as an introduction, and frequent readers of his column will know that his wife died several months ago and that it was too painful for him to write the obituary himself at the time. Mike Littwin is one of the more well-known journalists in Colorado, and has been publishing a regular opinion column for years.
This is like complaining that the clockwork orange is only briefly mentioned in A Clockwork Orange.