10 Years

Dearest Tommy:

How can it be 10 years?  I miss you!!

                            xoxo

That's What Friends Are For

This is a beautiful and moving story about a husband and wife and their love and respect for one another.

 

Sadly, the time recently arrived for one of them to say good-bye to the other.

 

In the following column by The Washington Post's Courtland Milloy, he writes of the spirit of the union between Washington Post reporter Lynne Duke and Washington Post editor Phillip Dixon in the essential phrase "sometimes yin and yang, sometimes nitro and glycerin."

 

Milloy is an awesome friend, doing what friends do best, offering emotional support and condolences to Phillip Dixon, and at the same time establishing that important and necessary connection to his deceased friend Lynne Duke, making sure that others know what a special person and reporter she was while she worked at The Washington Post.

Friends want to take care of you and provide comfort when they see you in pain and we should let them.  Sometimes they don't even need to say a word.  When I was with my friends, they let me cry, they listened to me talk about how unreal it felt and sometimes they gently held my hand.  That meant the world to me and I still remember those gestures of friendship after my husband died.

My thoughts and prayers are with you Phillip.

Photo Courtesy of Rodney Brooks
Former Washington Post journalists Lynne Duke and Phillip Dixon
 enjoy a Valentine’s Day party

After death of a fearless Post reporter,
her husband reaches out

By Courtland Milloy, Published: April 23

When Phillip Dixon called to say that his wife, Lynne Duke, had died after a long bout with cancer, I did what friends do and put myself at his disposal.

 

“What you can do,” he said, “is look me in the eye and tell me that we’ll get through this, that everything is going to be okay.”

 

A simple request. But en route to his home in Silver Spring, it occurred to me that saying those words was not the same as believing them. I’ve heard people tell mourners things such as “Life goes on” and “This too shall pass.” But I couldn’t imagine such cliches actually bringing comfort to a grieving soul. And Phil would certainly know if I were just mouthing the words.

 

He and Lynne had both worked at The Washington Post. He was a gifted editor, able to intuit what writers were trying to say and help them say it better. She had been one of the newspaper’s most graceful and evocative writers. In 1995, at age 38, she became the Johannesburg bureau chief — the newspaper’s first African American female foreign correspondent.

 

They married in 1999, soon after her return.

 

Lynne died at their home Friday. She was 56. The professionals at Montgomery Hospice had helped Phil care for her until the end. He was grateful for their service and greeted me at the door with a hug. Men, especially hard-boiled 61-year-old former editors like him, don’t usually reach out so unabashedly for emotional support. In fact, we guys are often reluctant to show any kind of feelings that might make us look weak or needy.

 

Caring for Lynne during her struggle with lung cancer, however, had helped Phil see that such feelings do not make us look weak, just human. In reaching out, he was teaching me a thing or two.

“Lynne used to tell me that I wasn’t ‘present’ when we talked,” he recalled. “I’d say: ‘What do you mean? I’m right here.’ Now I know what she meant: being totally immersed in our conversations, intellectually and emotionally, in the moment, in the here and now.”

 

Ouch, I was guilty, too. Being present meant listening, not just hearing. If you told me about a problem, I’d feel compelled to give you the answer — sometimes interrupting in mid-sentence, never listening long enough to know that you just wanted to talk it out, not be told what to do.

“I wish I’d gotten it sooner,” Phil said.

 

Don’t we all? But at least he got it. Some of us never do.

 

If anybody knew how to make her point, it was Lynne. Diminutive, 5 feet tall, she was known as the “Duke of Africa,” as fearless a foreign correspondent as there was. She’d covered much of the continent south of the equator — evading extraordinary dangers while chronicling the tragic reigns of Mobutu Sese Seko and Laurent Kabila in Zaire (now Congo), covering the triumphant return of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990, and then returning as bureau chief to report on then-President Mandela’s effort to rebuild a post-apartheid South Africa.

 

“I am neither an Afro-pessimist nor an Afro-optimist,” she wrote in her 2003 memoir, “Mandela, Mobutu, and Me: A Newswoman’s African Journey.” Rather, she was an “Afro-realist” with “affectionate concern for and loyalty to the African struggle . . . guided by legions of African people whose lives are built on extraordinary fortitude, unwavering hope and profound humanity despite immense odds.”

 

Most American newspapers no longer cover Africa — or any other place in the world, for that matter — with such passion, let alone send African American women to do it.

 

Lynne and Phil made a perfect match — a writer and an editor who met in the newsroom, went on to live under the same roof. Sometimes yin and yang, sometimes nitro and glycerin. Often laughing, sometimes arguing, always loving and fun to be around.

 

“I prayed that she would go peacefully and painlessly,” Phil told me. “This morning, I got on my knees and thanked God for answering my prayers.” He looked remarkably content, not distraught as I had expected, but like a man who knew that there was more to this world than meets the eye, that he’d felt the presence of a loving spirit when he needed it most.

 

“Everything is going to be okay,” I told him, convinced.

 

“I know,” Phil replied, smiling assuredly. Then it dawned on me: He’d known all along. Just wanted a worried friend to know it, too.

To read previous columns, go to washingtonpost.com/milloy.

© The Washington Post Company

My Paper Chase

I mentioned in yesterday's post that I've started going through a number of boxes of papers that once belonged to my husband. 

For those of you who have gone through the belongings of a spouse, friend or relative after they died, you know this is not a straightforward process.  Each of these boxes is potentially an emotional minefield because I don't know what's contained in them.  He filled them up and now they are waiting for my attention. 

You might be thinking, "It's just old papers.  What's the big deal?"  Since my husband was a reporter/writer/editor, these papers aren't the same kind of papers you might let pile up on your dining room table and then throw into a box.   I need to read the papers before I decide to throw them away.  These papers could be old stories he wrote or memos he wrote or ideas he jotted down on the fly.  

I'm sure it sounds rather lazy of me that I have let these boxes hang around for eight years and I have yet to go through them.  In a perfect world, I would have already sifted through all of the papers, tossed the ones that don't mean anything and read the ones that mean something and either filed them away or given them to a family member.

But, this being an entirely imperfect world, some of the boxes have been in a closet and some have been under a table in my home office.  I have attempted to go through them many times before but I would always come upon something frustrating g and then had to stop.  Sometimes I would open the boxes up just to remind myself what kind of stuff was inside.  If the papers on top were computer printout of stories from websites or printouts or newspapers from years ago, then I made a lot of progress and started throwing things away.

The hangups usually start when I find bev naps (short for beverage napkins in restaurant speak) with his hand writing on them and I start to read them or just stare at his handwriting or try to figure out why he wrote what he wrote.  Or I find a work email he printed out that is a record of a particularly funny incident or a particularly annoying disagreement he was having with a colleague.

Some of these papers are priceless and some of them are oh-so-painful.

I can hear his voice in my head as I read some of the notes and I have responded to him by saying, "Why did you leave all of this here for me to clean up?  I really don't know what to do with it.  I wish you had thrown it away when you had the chance."

And then, just as I am exasperated by the whole tedious process of it, I'll discover a real nugget of information that I have never seen before and can't wait to share with his children: a yellowed and wrinkled page from the December 8, 1967 Congressional Record showing that one of his stories was inserted by a senator.

I didn't see that one coming at all!