When I started as a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, more than a decade ago, in between covering shootings and assaults, the regular tragedies of city life, I also wrote obituaries.
The news obits, as we called them, typically focused on famous Chicago residents, though often they featured lesser-known folks; a Circuit Court judge, an administrative assistant who worked on the Manhattan Project, the owner of a Barrington car dealership.
I dreaded writing those obits. Not because I found the work unexciting or unimportant, not because I didn’t think I was good at them.
The fear I felt was in their finality, knowing that the words I typed might be last ever printed, maybe even ever written, about a person. I felt immense pressure to get everything right, to use the ideal word, to avoid even one clunky phrase, to draw out all of the possible emotion and pathos.
I cried sometimes, during those interviews, listening to sons and wives, bosses and friends, talk about who they’d lost, even if they’d had a full and long time on Earth.
Because I knew the person about whom I was writing had, at one point, plans for their life, plans that might have never materialized, plans that perhaps were fulfilled. They had loved and dreamed, had been useful and done things that were worthwhile. But whatever they had done, whatever plans or dreams they’d had, those were concluded over. Their journey was complete.
The last step was me writing about it.
Similarly, I’ve felt anxious about this column. I’ve worried since I decided to take the buyout that the Tribune offered to all its employees.
I don’t know what exactly to say, that’s true, but more importantly, I don’t want it to be over.
I don’t want to stop writing this column. I don’t want to no longer be a newspaper person. I don’t want to take that final step, walk out the door and leave the Tribune, even though I know that it’s time.
When I started my first post-collegiate job at a newspaper, I arrived fresh from a job waiting tables, one that had paid the bills adequately (and, honestly, better than that first job as a copy editor did) but never inspired me. At the restaurant, excited about what I was learning in journalism school, I had copy-edited the menu for the owners, used a red pen to mark up all the misspellings and incorrect punctuation, then handed it over with pride.
He’s annoyed, I thought, seeing the owner’s face as he looked down at the menu. But why? I’m telling him the truth. I’m making it better.
It was a lesson that I would learn well, if not quickly: Facts aren’t always welcome, and journalists, by presenting the facts, annoy people as often as they delight them. (I also learned that publicly correcting someone is, in general, pretty obnoxious.)
But walking into that busy newsroom for the first time, I encountered a different world, one filled with people like me — people who wanted what I wanted, who thought what I thought.
In that world, facts were beautiful, never shameful. In that world, you were thrilled, not embarrassed, when you corrected an error. In that world, truth sat on a throne, was more valuable than money or fame or any other common reward.
I would come, over the years, to see the flaws in that world, which in the early days seemed to me as perfect as Atlantis, Eden, Narnia.
We journalists could be supercilious, know-it-alls, snobby. We might feel like we knew more than people who didn’t write the words in the newspaper every day. We might have created a club, one that was tough to join, with rules that were difficult to understand by people who weren’t insiders.
Those flaws with journalism, really, are mostly flaws with humanity itself.
For looking around the world during the pandemic, I’ve realized that our greatest errors as humans often come when we forget that everyone is our neighbor.
Whether people live in Inverness or India, they’re sharing space on Earth with us, and us with them. They care about what we care about — our loved ones, our houses, our jobs — and they feel the same things we feel.
Remembering that can be tough sometimes. As a journalist, though, I’ve seen evidence of how quickly our pretensions about being important, about being the center of the universe, can be stripped away. And though we’re all the heroes of our own stories, we cannot truly enjoy the story unless we care about all of the characters inside it.
Over the years, it’s become clear to me that every story has nuance. Every one is complex.
I want, more and more, to explore that complexity. I want to move away from the facts and into the truth. As Chief Bromden says in “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” “it’s the truth, even if it didn’t happen.”
And when it comes to my career, I’ve been thinking a lot about goldfish.
Goldfish can’t breed or thrive if they don’t have enough food and water. They stay small, if they’re in a small tank. The larger the body of water in which they swim, the larger they can get.
It’s time for me to try a different pond.
I also have young children, kids who I figure will give me about five or six more years of walking beside them, hugging them in public, kissing them when I leave the house. I’d like to soak up as much of those years as possible, and I plan to do that, more and more, every day.
But before I close, I want to thank you all, for reading what I have written so far. Thank you, for letting me get outside the bell jar of the pandemic. Thank you for letting me tell you about the ghost faucet and the marbles and the planets and the trains. I’m certain I got more out of it than you did.
In the meantime, until we meet again, I will keep writing. Maybe I’ll write this column again, maybe even in these same pages.
Who knows what the future will hold?
After all, I’m not dead yet, and this is not my obituary. It is only a goodbye.
Georgia Garvey was the editor-in-chief of Tribune Publishing’s Lake County News-Sun and Pioneer Press publications.
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