How to grieve when you’re a journalist
A few thoughts about what the hell we do after Matthew Power and Peter Kaplan
At the beginning of this endless, exhausting, dehumanizing, absolutely garbage winter, my old boss Peter Kaplan died. He’d been sick a while and he’s been gone a whole season, but most days I still have trouble really and truly accepting that he’s now like one of his favorite black-and-white movies on TCM, like Casablanca or Duck Soup or His Girl Friday, that he’s a figure I can rewatch in my head or that we can recount in our stories, but that any time I need his advice or his approval, which is often, I have to make do with the things he’s already said.
Yesterday, as the weather turned gentle and conciliatory after so much abuse, a lot of us woke to the news that Matt Power had died, on assignment in Uganda. I’ve known Matt for years, though we shared best friends more than we were close friends. I’d mistaken him in the beginning of our relationship for a Kerouac goofball, more romantic about himself than observant about his subjects, but the longer we knew one another and the older I grew as an editor, I started to understand the deftness and decency of his work, how he used the exuberant, propulsive genre of boy’s adventures to reveal stories about the hidden, the impoverished, the odd, the oppressed, the wronged, the broken. (Harry Siegel, of The New York Daily News, makes this same point better.)
He was a sweet, graceful, warm person too, and for a whole bunch of people all over the world it’ll be years, probably, until it stops feeling like Matt’s just off on another TinTin adventure, in some place whose name you remember only from some half-magical-seeming map you saw when you were a kid, and soon he’ll be on his way home, to this bar right here, that dinner tomorrow, this party tonight.
After those two losses, I’ve mostly been thinking: Stop fucking dying, everybody. But I’ve also been thinking a lot about how to grieve—and I don’t mean how to grieve as a person, but as a journalist. The answer I came up with is obvious.
If I worked on Wall Street, what would I do to honor some gone friend? Make more money? Short frozen OJ futures? Stage a hostile takeover of some poor company, a creeping tender offer in his name? Once upon a time a prince of England, when his father the king died, would go pummel a little corner of France and feel better.
But we’re journalists, and so our grief and our consolation can only take one shape, after the hangovers rub off. We can tell stories that Kaplan and Matt would have loved, because, holy cow, they loved stories. We can tell stories as entertaining and as emotional as the stories we’re all telling about Peter Kaplan and Matthew Power.
Editors can assign trend pieces that capture those infectious, hilarious, screwball ideas that are just about to occur to the rest of us and they can assign profiles that snap unmercifully around powerful, ridiculous people like animal traps. Writers can buy plane tickets with many obscure connections or bus tickets to nearby but faraway spots, pack up backpacks with few changes of underwear, and go find some person or place or problem we don’t even know how urgently we need to know.
The amazing part? We can do it again and again and again. And with every story we can do a little better, push a little harder, go a little farther, get a little weirder, be a little truer. And we’ll feel happier, knowing such awesome stories would have made Kaplan and Matt happy.
So. Stop reading this and get to work.