Saying Goodbye to a Journalist

A couple of nights ago, just before dropping into bed, I checked my e-mail inbox, as is my practice. I wish I hadn't.

One of the messages brought such horrible, sad news that it's been nearly impossible to think about much else since I read it. The e-mail, forwarded to me by a magazine editor, was from the writer Claudia Dowling, and it was blunt.

I wondered for a while today if it would be appropriate to share a portion of the letter on 'The Huffington Post,' and I decided that, under the circumstances, it would be exactly the right thing to do.

Here it is:

Cheryl McCall called me today. It’s her 55th birthday, and she says it is her last. She has a very aggressive cancer of everything — bones, lungs, brain, lymph nodes, liver. She was running her law office and walking two miles a day three weeks ago; now she is in bed, using a walker to get to the bathroom. She doesn’t have long, and she has a daughter, Jessie, who is 16.

She wants memories, anecdotes of her years as a young turk journalist. Jessie never knew her mother as anything but a lawyer in a small town in California. Cheryl wants to leave her reminiscences of the other part of her life — the argumentative, racy, out-there, New York babe we knew.

The e-mail had been sent to many of us who'd worked with Cheryl in the early days of People magazine.

Cheryl McCall was one of the first great reporters at the then brand-new People, which is where I first met her. She was whip-smart, aggressive, pretty to look at, and she always got along with the guys, which was an asset in the pre-politically correct days (the early '70s) when the magazine was totally run by hard-charging male editors.

I didn't know her well. She was in New York, I was posted to Pittsburgh. But everyone at the magazine understood that Cheryl McCall was one of the anointed ones, one of the editors' favorites. She flat-out out-talented many of her peers.

That's the thing about journalists, the truly gifted ones, anyway: They are smarter than just about everyone else. I've always believed (and I don't think naively) that the best journalists are intuitively brighter than most lawyers, doctors, professors, and scientists. It's not hard to explain why: They are guided by an ever-present curiousity, a need to know the truth, and a hard-wired navigation system that steers them past the steaming bull that so impresses most folks.

It's for these reasons that I have always both loved and admired journalists.

I suspect that Cheryl's daughter Jessie will hear from many of her mom's old pals in the world of big-time media. They will tell her about the sassy reporter who helped put People on the map when plenty of critics thought it didn't have a chance in hell. They will doubtless share tales of the woman who, to everyone's surprise, turned to the practice of law late in life and settled in an out-of-the-way California community -- but yet, all these years later, was still freqeuntly talked about among her former magazine colleagues in Manhattan and elsewhere.

How could Jessie do anything but savor those zesty war stories about her mom?

To my way of thinking, remembering is healing: It honors the dead at the same time it soothes the living.

About 10 years ago, long after I'd left the staff of People, I one day phoned a reporter I had hired when I was the Boston bureau chief, a woman who'd done excellent work and who was still with the magazine in New England. Her name was Sue Brown.

I called Sue simply to catch up, to see how she'd weathered another tough Boston winter.

"So, you haven't heard?" she said.

"No. Heard what?"

"I'm dying," Sue answered in the emotionless tone of a reporter recounting the details of a routine news story. "I've got cancer. It seemed to come about suddenly. I'm in bed now, and I'm nearly blind. I've got only a few weeks, maybe a couple of months to live." She was pretty much alone at the time.

We talked for a while. What does one say? We tried for a convenient laugh, but neither of us could find one.

Finally, deliberately, I said to her, "Sue, there's one thing I promise you. It's all I can do: I will always remember you." She thanked me.

A few weeks later she was gone.

I think about Sue Brown every so often, as I vowed I would. She was a private woman, always a fine woman, and a credit to her profession.

It's always hard to say goodbye to someone you've known, especially someone in the prime of life. Harder still -- for me, at least -- when it's such a good journalist.

And so I promise I will always remember Cheryl McCall.

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