A long-time friend, Randall Shields, called me several weeks ago and asked me to write his obituary.
Most people leave the obituary writing to their closest relatives — to be done in a post-mortem timeframe when honesty is consumed by grief and sentimentality. Such seems a safe and sensible thing to do. Too much truth might ruin a good funeral.
Randall, however, didn’t spend his life seeking safety at the expense of exploration. He didn’t tiptoe around, looking for his truths in the comfort of majority opinion. He wasn’t afraid to open a door in a dark hallway to see if the next room had a light switch.
Toward the end of our active newspaper management careers, Randall and I worked as publishers for sister newspapers for the former Home News Enterprises newspaper group. I was publisher of The Republic and its commercial printing operations in Columbus. Randall held a similar position at the Daily Reporter in Greenfield.
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While our personal relationship was warm, our business relationship often was chilly. To say we didn’t always agree about whether light or darkness was behind the business doors he opened was an understatement. Yet, even when I believed we had settled the matter in my favor — “discussion closed” — Randall would keep pounding away at his vision.
He was irritating. More than once, our telephone conversations ended with me shouting a few expletives and slamming the receiver back into the cradle while he was still calmly re-explaining his position on the other end of the line.
Yet, while Randall’s persistent, “take no prisoners” negotiating style sometimes made me furious, I never doubted his intelligence, openness to discussion, rich imagination or high values. And, in retirement, those qualities built a real, trusting friendship between us, even though our paths crossed much less frequently.
He and his wife, Patrice, spent much of their retirement traveling about the country in their RV. I hadn’t been in touch with them for two years when a text from him popped up on my cellphone in June. The message said: “Give me a call when you have time. I want to tell you about some health problems I am having.”
The health problems turned out to be pancreatic cancer that had moved on to his liver — a liver he had received in a transplant operation years earlier after a bout with hepatitis. He and Patrice had moved into an apartment in Bethesda, Maryland, to be closer to both family and appropriate medical treatment.
The text led to emails and phone calls — long, often humorous, conversations about everything from favorite books, to fly fishing, to odd-ball co-workers, to the meanings of both life and death.
Our discussion of his diagnosis was just subtext in our conversations — not because Randall was overwhelmed by fear of death, but because he had so many other subjects he kept illuminating as he flipped those familiar light switches in his mind.
Of course, he didn’t want to die and followed every treatment path available, both within traditional and non-traditional medicine. In one of our conversations, I used the time-worn, trite “comfort phrase” about his being engaged in a “battle with cancer.”
“This is not a battle,” he corrected me. “The journey is to find peace with the disease.” And part of “finding peace” was meticulous planning for his earthly exit. The preparations included the usual creation and review of “end of life documents.” Another part was reconnecting with friends and relatives — by phone, email and text — for honest conversations.
Then one day, while I was out for a walk to a downtown coffee shop, my cellphone rang and my friend’s voice broke through the morning calm: “Would you be willing to write my obituary?” Of course I was willing, although to say I was enthusiastic about the request was a bit of a stretch.
Over a 45-year newspaper career — half of which was spent as a writer and editor — I had written hundreds of obituaries. What I had never done was write the obituary of a friend and then send it to him to read before his death. The idea was unnerving and I told him so.
Then, just when I was about to tell Randall he should write the obituary himself, he said he wasn’t objective enough to write it. He wanted it written by someone who would give a glimpse of who he was, not just list the things he had done. He told me life is not about the way we die. Life is actually not about the “big things” at all, unless the big things really are the little things that made us human — values lived and left in evidence.
I told him I would try. While I couldn’t leave the usual “obituary resume” details out of the writing, I would try to give a glimpse of “who he was” along with the resume.
I wrote about a guy who home-brewed such excellent beer that friends nicknamed him “Brewster.” I told how he loved the freedom of hot air ballooning so much that he became a balloon pilot and then an instructor. I told of the joy he had traveling about the country with his wife in their RV, attending music festivals. I told about a child so motivated that he became an Eagle Scout at the age of 13.
When I finished, Randall was more pleased with the obituary than I was. I told him he had given me an impossible task and he should now write my obituary as payment.
“We are all terminal at the moment of birth,” I reminded him. “Who says you won’t outlive me?”
But Randall, once again, won the argument. He died Sept. 13 at the age of 68 in his Bethesda apartment, surrounded by his entire family — including two yet-to-be-born grandchildren, who will be his first.
In one of our last conversations, he talked about the mystery of consciousness and the possibility of multiple realities — how death might be just the opening of a door from earthly reality to unity with the universe.
Maybe he found the door in the dark hallway and flipped the light switch. I wouldn’t bet against him.
Bud Herron is a retired editor and newspaper publisher who lives in Columbus. He served as publisher of The Republic from 1998 to 2007. His weekly column appears on the Opinion page each Sunday. All opinions expressed are those of the writer. Contact him at [email protected].
