KINGSTON, R.I. — Where the black hearse had stopped, the honor guard began: nearly 60 journalists standing in silent formation outside a church on a rural New England road. On another morning we might be enemy combatants, but here we stood in solidarity, representing television stations, radio outlets, newspapers. The media.

One of ours had died. Jim Taricani had been a Rhode Island television reporter so formidable that Providence Journal reporters like me would dread six o’clock each night, for fear of another Taricani scoop about the scandal du jour in Pawtucket, Woonsocket or the State House. He was 69 when he died late last month, and had been contending with health problems for as long as most of us had known him.

Image Jim Taricani in 2004. Credit... Victoria Arocho/Associated Press

Now came the pause just before the gray-gloved pallbearers present the coffin to the white-robed priest — when death sheds its last vestige of abstraction. And in that solemn stillness, a man standing on the quiet road shouted a full-throated expletive that included the choice:

“Burn in hell!”

None of the journalists ran to confront him. After all, he had merely exercised his freedom of speech. A few of us even imagined how Mr. Taricani might have relished the boorish disruption of somber ritual.