The biggest shock was the plane crash, which didn't happen here, but in Flagstaff, Ariz., taking the life of a popular 57-year-old river runner and engineer who was involved in the borough's energy and sustainability commission. The man fixing my plumbing is on the commission too. I was looking down the cellar steps at him and all the parts of the boiler on the floor when I shared the news. "Really?" he said, shaken. "I was just e-mailing him last night." Then he said, "You just never know do you?"
Sometimes you do. We knew my mother was dying, but she didn't appear to. And we also knew that two of the other deaths this week in Haines were imminent, but that didn't seem to make them easier on their loved ones. I read an interview recently with Katie Couric. Her husband died slowly of colon cancer, and when asked how she wanted to die, Katie said, "quickly."
But the point of an obituary is not to write about how we die. It is to provide an outline of the years from birth to death, with a few illuminating details, in the amount of space the newspaper allots. Ideally, as my editor, Tom, says, an obituary and all news stories should be like a woman's skirt, long enough to cover the material and short enough to hold our interest.
Tom Moody had mine from the get go. He was easy to like, a big, gentle guy with a gray ponytail and open face. He ran the Mount Ripinsky Run on the Fourth of July and swam in the Polar Bear dip on News Year's Day. This year it was crazy cold. The pilings of the nearby dock had a foot of ice on them. Tom ran down the beach into the surf with his wife. They both emerged laughing and, like all of the swimmers, gasping at the way the cold slapped them to new life on the first day of a new year. Since then I have met them a few times snowshoeing on the Ripinsky Trail. You don't often see someone up there, so it was nice to have that friendly hello in the cold woods. We didn't stop for long though, because of the sudden chill that comes when motion ceases.
In writing Tom's obituary, I learned that he went on a family Grand Canyon float trip to celebrate his high school graduation (he was from Arizona) and chose the river running life over college. He was a professional guide for 20 years and first came this way 30 years ago to do exploratory trips down the Tatshensheni River.
Tom's wife, Stephanie, said he fell in love with Alaska, which is what happened to most of us. And then in the way things also often happen -- call it chance or fate -- he was stranded by clouds and rain so often in Dry Bay, at the mouth of the rivers he ran, that he made friends in nearby Yakutat and ended up buying a commercial salmon set net permit. He fished for a decade.
When he was ready to settle down he married Stephanie, they had son, and in 1995, in his 40s, he graduated from Northern Arizona U. with a degree in civil engineering. He was a wise but young 57, just hitting his stride in many ways. He worked in Flagstaff and sort of lived in Haines, settling the family at the hillside house that he built in about a month one summer with 40 friends from all over chipping in and raising it like a barn. He was pleased his son, a freshman, chose go to high school here, where he would have opportunities to explore Alaska, experience small town life, and (who would believe it?) visit the Supreme Court to hear arguments in a local case involving the Kensington gold mine and the Clean Water Act, something that Tom, who specialized in stream restoration, was keenly interested in.
That's all a long way of saying, as my plumber friend did, "you just never know."
But I do know, for sure, that the proper response to a sadly surprising obituary is to hug the people you love.
Heather Lende lives and writes in Haines and is the author of "If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name." She can be reached at hlende@adnmail.com.
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