A thousand thank yous to those of you who’ve called, emailed, sent flowers, or in some way let me know you were thinking of Mazie and me. I’m doing about as well as I could be, I imagine. Funeral’s tomorrow. Tomorrow night will hopefully bring a long night’s sleep.
Hopefully I’ll be up to writing more about Mazie sometime soon. But in the meantime, I want to point out that Howard Swindle died a few hours after Mazie. From 2000 until he entered hospice care a couple months ago, Howard sat across the aisle from me at the Morning News. Let me tell you, that man was a hell of a journalist. Overhearing his phone calls was a journalistic education — he could get anybody to tell him anything. And he was an honest man with an underdog’s spirit. These three grafs in the DMN obit tell the story:
“One of his secrets to getting information was that he was so likeable,” said Eric Miller, a former colleague. Mr. Miller, now an investigator in Washington, said he learned from Mr. Swindle that the soft-sell works. “He never talked down to people, and treated everyone with respect, whether they lived in trailer parks or mansions. I marveled at how he could get anyone to talk.”
[Managing editor Stu] Wilk said he, too, was struck by Mr. Swindle
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Josh — I am so sorry to hear of Mazie’s passing. I know that by now the services have taken place and you’re in that strange spot where the public rituals of mourning are over and now you must begin to sort through the physical objects and odds and ends that are left behind after the force of a life has gone.
Mazie and my beloved Grandmother shared a birthday, and I was delighted to participate in your birthday card project a few years ago, as it made me feel that somehow I was sending a card to my own Gran as well. After my grandparents (who raised me) passed away, it took us many weeks to face the painful work of sorting through their belongings, deciding what to keep, what to sell, what to give a way. The one thing I learned from that experience is that it is very tempting, in the midst of all that ‘stuff’, to lose track of the knowledge that the sum of ones life is more than a pile of objects. You know that the sum of Mazie’s life was more than the things she left behind — don’t lose track of that thought. The objects in her house are just the tools she used to live her life, they are not the life itself.