Before Her Time

Mike D'Orso writes to me:

A dear friend of mine, a well-known local radio deejay and music producer here in the Norfolk area came down with cancer at about your age. During her last weeks, I visited her often at her parents' home, where she'd had to move back in the late stages of the illness.

She was a smart, savvy young woman (we were all young), with a heart large enough to climb into — a rare combination. Anyhow, during one of what turned out to be my last visits, she turned to me and said, "I know the paper is going to do some kind of big story when I die. I know they're going to have someone who doesn't know me talk to a bunch of people who hardly know me….," and she asked me if I would consider writing that story rather than some stranger.

It was one of the most difficult things I've ever done, morphing from a friend at her bedside in to her Boswell, spending hours "interviewing" her in a way I never had any reason or desire to, learning things I'd never known about her life, talking about some very difficult subjects — talking, period, when so often the last thing we wanted or needed to do was talk. But there wasn't much time, and we both knew it.

We were right. In fact, I finally sat down to begin writing a first draft of this piece one evening, and the next morning got news she had passed away. I was looking forward to reading at least some of the story to her,to give her a chance to hear some of the wonderful things so many people had to say. But I never got that chance. And there was no second draft. I actually had to finish it the next day like a news story, with an editor standing over my shoulder glancing at his watch while I finished the piece on deadline.

Looking back some 17 years later, from a writer's point of view, I'm so glad I had the experience and training in what we're now calling "longform" journalism that I could at least come close to doing Carol's story justice.

Personally, it remains one of the stories dearest to my heart that I've ever done.

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(The full story is posted in the comments section of this thread.)