As many readers of this site already know, Steve Hitov, the CIW’s longtime General Counsel — an essential member of the CIW’s strategic core and co-author of many of the CIW’s most important structural successes — passed away three weeks ago after living, and thriving, with multiple cancers for the final decade of his life. He was 72 years old. Steve was a fierce fighter for universal human rights, a brilliant legal thinker, and an inveterate sucker for a bad pun.

There are not enough pages in the internet for us to express our love and appreciation for Steve, but we have written an obituary of sorts, a very short story of his life, that we share with you today below (a more formal obituary appeared in The Washington Post this past weekend). As painful as it was to write — and as impossible as it still is for us to believe that he is no longer with us — we wanted the world to know what we knew about Steve, to know the remarkable life he led, and the example of tireless commitment and undying love for justice that he left for all of us.

Indeed, in the final week before Steve passed, our Immokalee family sent him messages of love, gratitude, and support, and the words of CIW’s Gerardo Reyes Chavez capture the collective sense of Steve’s legacy and what he meant for our community:

It has been an honor to work with you all of these years. The dream of a world in which we don’t have to give up our dignity as workers in order to have a job or food on the table, is possible thanks to you. The decades of fighting alongside our community to eliminate abuses, your creativity, knowledge and determination were a crucial part of the creation of the Fair Food Program and making the WSR model a reality today. Thank you for everything you built with us and for choosing to be our family and our friend.

In life, Steve’s was not a familiar face among the CIW’s better known leaders, but he would have had it no other way. He was far more comfortable in the background, keeping an eye on the proceedings rather than out front leading them. Indeed, he never would have let us publish a piece like this while he was still here. But the one, and only, silver lining to the dark, dark cloud of his passing is that we can celebrate his contributions the way they should be, and we hope you enjoy this glimpse into the life of an invisible — but never quiet – hero: