Rocky dies, but its stories live on

By Jim Sheeler, Rocky Mountain News

Published February 26, 2009 at 9 p.m.

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Nobody stopped.

We stood in the parking lot of a mortuary in Reno, Nev., as the cars whizzed by on the busy road nearby. A few feet away, a pregnant, 23-year-old war widow slept near the flag-draped casket of her husband - their last night together before the next day's funeral.

If anyone would have stopped - simply slowed down - they could have seen one of the most touching moments of pure, distilled love I've ever witnessed. All anyone had to do was look at the giant picture window of the mortuary, as a lone Marine watched over the sleeping woman. Instead, the headlights of the cars continued and, through my tears, I stared at them through the blur.

I stood in the parking lot with photographer Todd Heisler, and we looked back into the window. The sleeping widow reminded us why we were there.

We could make people stop.

I have a quote taped near my computer. It has hung there long since I started writing for the Rocky Mountain News, penned by a man who searched out the lives in the shadows.

"I don't write stories to show how people are different. I try to show how people are the same."

Rocky columnist Greg Lopez is one of the many people I never met whose lessons I will never forget. The people I would later meet in the newsroom would continue to shape every word I wrote - every word I will ever write.

When I arrived at the Rocky, I was known primarily as an obituary writer. I wanted to tell the stories that might be lost. I wanted to tell them for the last time.

Despite the hundreds of life stories I've told - after all of the tear-smeared drives returning from funerals - this remains one of the most difficult.

We're not trained to write obituaries in first person.

Walls of journalism prizes hang in the newsroom, but they're not the real rewards. For those of us privileged enough to spend time with the true storytellers, satisfaction comes from life lessons learned in living rooms and backyards, in cemeteries and rolling plains.

A few years ago, I stood in the basement of a Boulder war hero - a man who had participated in the Doolittle Raids on Tokyo during World War II. After spending the morning with Bill Bower, I asked him why his medals weren't displayed. He said he didn't even know where they were. And then he told the story:

"One day, I came home to find that the children had taken out all the medals and were playing with them, and had kind of torn them up.

"At first I was angry with them, but then I realized something: that's all the medals are - things for little kids to play with."

The old man then looked at me.

"Why be known for the medals," he said, "when you can be known for the kids."

The Rocky's offspring will live on in the stories - nearly 150 years' worth - clipped and pasted in scrapbooks, hanging on refrigerators, yellowing in museums, lingering in countless minds. Their power is one that, for a few minutes or a few hours, takes the readers to places they've never been, places they need to go.

The Rocky Mountain News was not a building. It was not a printing press. It is what we all are: a collection of stories.

For me, those stories included a trip to the eastern plains, where a 76-year-old man drove his 103-year-old father to a special spot, and described a sunset for the man who couldn't see. I remember Thanksgiving in the subsidized apartment building where most people had no family, so they created their own. I still hear the gravelly, warbling voice of 110-year-old Mamie Legg as she sang on her birthday, and the feel of the rice-paper skin of her hand on my own.

"People come in here, and they ask, 'Why are you still alive?' " she said. "I tell them, 'I guess I'm here so I can talk to you.' "

At their best, they were the stories that showed how we are all the same. They were the kind of stories that could put readers in a crumbly parking lot near a dark, busy street and allow them to look in the window at a single, tiny scene that was both beautiful and haunting. And maybe, if just for a moment, make them stop.

Tomorrow, the headlights on the dark street will continue. This time, we'll all be left staring into the blur.

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