Love and death: Learning from the life and work of Rob Hiaasen

When I got word of the killings in Annapolis Thursday, my thoughts went to a beloved former student, Diana Sugg, who coaches writers at The Baltimore Sun. That paper owns the Capital Gazette, where five were murdered in their place of friendship and work. As I expected, Sugg knew of some of the journalists there.

In an email message, Sugg mentioned a young reporter named Tim Prudente, whom she described as “an ace in the making.” Sugg once talked to Prudente about the ideas of a famous writing teacher named Donald Murray. She presented him with an essay written by Murray titled “Writer in the Newsroom.” But Prudente already had a copy, “a worn highlighted copy.”

It came to Prudente from Rob Hiaasen, who had coached him for four years and thought he’d be inspired by Murray’s encouraging words. What a terrible thing for a writer to have to cover not just the passing, but the murder, of a trusted mentor.

I have spent the day getting to know Rob Hiaasen. He died yesterday with four of his colleagues at his newspaper office. But today — through his words — he feels very much alive. Shakespeare had it right, didn’t he, when he wrote to his lover: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

Hiaasen’s job, as described under his smiling photograph, was to write columns about “the human side of life.” The human side of life includes death. We are the only species that knows it is coming.

The human beings who happen to be journalists know something else as well. They learn every day that death arrives in surprising ways, from the front page story of a mother and child run over by street-racing teens to the 98-year-old great great grandmother whose obituary tells her life story on the back pages. “In the end,” said the great Francis X. Clines of The New York Times at a Poynter writing seminar, “our job is to tell the morbid truth.

And so the newspaper workers in Annapolis — in the depths of their grief, minutes after their escape — begin to tell the story for the next day’s edition.

For a writer whose writing voice was so lively and whose eye captured the most eccentric expressions of daily life, Rob Hiaasen wrote, to quote Wordsworth, with intimations of mortality. In a recent column for Mother’s Day he reflects on how his Sunday conversations with his mom took the darkness out of scary Sunday afternoons and how her passing left him at a Sunday loss:

If you’re lucky, you don’t wait too long to grow up and appreciate your parents. So, she and I talked on the phone Sundays about personal things. As the years ticked off, our conversations dwindled. Then what happened — along with every awful thing that happens with an aging parent — is our talks ended. Too tiring, too much, too hard by the end. Before that, though, in all those years of talking and listening on those scary Sundays, she was there. In our make-believe meeting of the minds, I would call, and she would know exactly when I’d be calling. I’d wait to hear that opening invitation, that most personal of questions: “How are you, son?”

His words bring her back to life.

He marked St. Patrick’s Day at an Irish pub with reflections on life, death, and the power of the word, especially the words of Irish author James Joyce:

There are many unfair things — and this is one of them: For St. Patrick’s Day, we should be able to resurrect a dead Irish writer for a day of agreeable interlude. Just one day before returning them to their roused earth to resume resting in peace. Resting in peace? Ha! Imagine a Joycean response to that sentimental conviction! Life, as the Irish say, will break your heart. Death can’t be an upgrade, can it? But how wonderful it is to leave in your wake words that are more than enough for some. Does everything magical have to be a story? See, I have questions. Rise then, Joyce. Join me once more at McDermott’s, and when it’s very late we’ll go outside by the creek and talk of ghosts and giants.

Life will break your heart. Hiaasen wrote about the recent death of a girl he loved in high school, more than 40 years ago:

Have you ever lost a loved one you haven’t loved in 40 years? Naturally, I was slow to hear the news since we hadn’t spoken in 40 years. But this past year — my 40th high school reunion — I learned of her death through a series of reunion-based email trails. It was a strange punch in the gut — not powerful but glancing. The wind wasn’t knocked out of me, but memories were. She was my first serious girlfriend, and our first date was Senior Prom. She was tall, pretty and shy. She was kind and difficult. She was the only person I knew who played soccer and the flute. She kept me company until she left. Hers was an unsentimental and durable leaving. There were no post-break-up meetings, no chances for reconciliation. Boy loses girl. Period. Sometimes you just know when love is done. She knew.

In a column featuring the work of local authors, he wrote:

Books are far from dead — in fact, they continue to breed like brainy, creative, adventurous rabbits. We should know. The Capital is a satellite library for books of local interest, labors of love shipped to us in fine, sturdy envelopes or left at our doorstep on Bestgate Road.

Left at their doorstep. There was something about books, stories, words that could hold off the ravages of time and age, if only for a moment.

Long rainy gloomy stretches of rain could drag us down, so he listed his favorite songs about rain and asked his readers to do the same. (Hiaasen’s list was better.) He wrote about a neighborhood cat named Athena who disappeared from home for two weeks, feared gone forever, until his column led to her rescue and return.

On his birthday, he wrote about all the things that happened during 1959, the year he was born, things he didn’t experience because, hey, he was a baby: including the Day the Music Died, marking plane crash deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens. (Numbers can be haunting. Born in 1959, Hiaasen is taken from us at age 59.)

Hiaasen was, among other things, a writing coach, and in honor of his passing, I took another look at that essay by my writing coach, Donald Murray, and noted how often Don wrote about death. Ann, his middle daughter, died young, a loss that haunted and inspired Don’s future work, including this column in the Boston Globe:

The morning our 20-year-old daughter Lee took sick with her last illness, I was trying to write a letter of sympathy wondering what I could say, asking myself if it would make any difference. Five days later I knew. It made a difference. I discovered it was better to reach out than turn away, to say the wrong thing than say nothing. But in living through Lee’s loss and others I also discovered I had something to say to others who suffered the loss of someone they loved. Pain is better than forgetting.

In that spirit, Murray concludes his essay with a poem called “Long Distance” about how he had become closer to his father in death than in life, his father always seeming distracted doing business on the telephone:

Father was always on the phone,

listening to strangers. After I left home, we made

peace on the telephone And became good at distance,

a careful reaching out. When he died, I told Mother

we should bury him with a phone At his ear. Mother laughed,

but disapproved. The phone rings. It is Dad,

calling long distance.

Murray testifies that he was surprised when the words of that poem came to him:

The poem was a surprise and it offered me a strange comfort, a different vision of the life I lead. I wish you such surprises. And I wish you a craft you can never learn — but can keep learning as long as you live.

That idea must have connected with Rob Hiaasen because he lived out its spirit. Keep working on your craft for as long as you live — and pass it on to inspire others.