Photo

SPECIAL POST — It is with great sadness that we announce the death of über-constructor Merl Reagle on Saturday, August 22, 2015. Mr. Reagle was 65 years old.

I’m sorry; I just can’t write his obituary. He was my friend, and today I can only write what is in my heart.

You’ll read more about him and his Sunday Crosswords in the days to come from other venues. And I hope I’m forgiven for breaking with copy editing formalities, because he wasn’t “Mr. Reagle.” He was merl, spelled with a lower case “m,” just the way he wrote it, although if anyone deserved a capital letter, he did.

Truthfully, I can’t process a world without Merl in it.

He made people happy, even when he didn’t feel good about himself, because that was the kind of friend he was. If you had a success in the business, he was there to congratulate you. If you had even a minor setback, he was there, with words of wisdom and a joke so bad that you couldn’t help but laugh. If Merl liked you — and he liked nearly everyone for one reason or another — he became your champion.

Merl was one of the few constructors who, with the incredibly savvy and indispensable partnership of his wonderful wife, Marie Haley, was able to syndicate and make a full-time living from constructing crossword puzzles. The two of them were my heroes just for that, because they inspired me to look for a way to make a living from my writing.

He and Marie both endured the loss of parents to Alzheimer’s disease, and so he helped found and run the National Brain Game Challenge with the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America, which sponsored a contest using Merl’s puzzles to increase awareness about resources available to Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers.

Merl, along with Will Shortz, had the ultimate honor of being immortalized on “The Simpsons.”

Merl anagrammed like other people breathe. His brain was fascinating. Somewhat shy by nature, his opening salvo when he met you was to anagram your name and, from there, the ice was always broken. One of my fondest — and most embarrassing — encounters with him was at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, right after my book, “It’s Not P.M.S., It’s You” came out, when he stopped an entire hotel lobby’s worth of people dead in their tracks by pointing at me from across that lobby and bellowing “Smutty Positions!” It was an anagram of the book’s title, and it was his way of saying hello after not seeing me for a whole year.

I can’t bear the thought that I won’t see him there next year.

If you’d like to enjoy some of Merl’s incredible puzzles, please buy them from his website, Sunday Crosswords. It would be a wonderful tribute to him. And he deserves nothing less than a wonderful tribute.

Your thoughts?