I want to tell you about Heather.

On Wednesday morning she wasn’t feeling well.

She had a sharp pain in her side, she told me.

She’d been googling appendicitis.

I asked her, “Will you go to the doctor?”

And she said yes, and didn’t argue. And that was unusual, because she was a busy woman and doctors visits cost money, unpredictable money, you never knew how much.

She went but by then the pain had stopped. They said she was okay and let her go.

Throughout the day we talked.

By that I mean we texted, and by that I mean we used WhatsApp.

She lived in Providence and I live outside of Boston. For a month we’d been texting each other links to real estate listings. We planned to buy a house together in Rhode Island in the fall. I promised her she could have a dog. She kept trying to upsell me on chickens, which worked, and a llama, at which point I said, “Listen. No pets taller than me.” Her response: “Mini llamas?”

I went to work and after work I met an old friend I’d worked on a project with and we went to a storytelling event.

When I got home, I texted her and told her about it. We said goodnight by text Wednesday evening at 11:02 PM.

The last thing I ever said to her was that I loved her.

The next day at 11 AM I texted her again. “Hello, gorgeous! How’s my best girl?”

I had a busy day at work and it wasn’t until 6PM that I looked again.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t responded — when she wasn’t painting, she worked with children and they were a handful — it was that she hadn’t read the message. That wasn’t like her at all.

I called and called and texted and sent a Facebook message and I thought, “If I don’t hear from her by 8 o’clock I’m going to drive down there, and her car is going to be gone and her apartment will be empty and I’ll just feel dumb because she had the week off and had so many plans and had friends and relatives in places out in Central Mass where the cell signal is not so good.”

But then her mother called me.

Heather was dead.

She was supposed to pick up her brother at 8AM, and she didn’t show up; they called the police.

The police went in her apartment and found her body.

She thought she was okay, she wasn’t, and she went home and she died.

She was 41 years old. This photo was taken the day before she died.

Heather was not like other people.

One time, I saw her pet a bee.

She was sitting in a patch of flowers that always grew in my lawn. I liked them and always left a patch unmowed for them to grow. The bees liked them.

She had gotten a bee to land on the tip of her index finger, and she was petting it, lightly, with the tip of her other index finger.

“You can pet it,” she said.
“No, honey,” I said. “The bee won’t sting you, but it will sting me.”

She could talk to street mutterers, and calm inconsolable children, children even their parents could do nothing to help.

I saw a deer walk up to her in the forest, get less than arm’s length from her, sniffing the air around her.

Whenever I came into her presence I’d feel a sense of relief and well-being wash over me.

“It’s like I’m dating a character from a children’s book,” I said. Just a little unearthly.

Don’t let yourself think that she wasn’t a grownup; she was responsible, scrupulous with money, prompt, hardworking. I once saw her Priority Mail her electric bill so it wouldn’t be late. But…she wasn’t quite like us.

Years ago on our anniversary, I said, “Don’t tell anybody because I’ll lose all my street cred, but I wrote you a love poem.” This is that poem.

I love you all your ways
Your marvelous ease
Your glorious difficulty

A finely made scientific
instrument
And fairytale forest
creatures
Had a baby

And it was you

I love you all your ways
Your impeccable sass
Your inventive femininity

I do not love all my ways
My glittering bitch
My sturdy butch

But I love you all your ways
And you love my ways for me.

I wrote this on six index cards and carried it around in my pocket for a week because the idea of giving it to her made me so bashful.

Whenever she wasn’t working with children, she was painting. Constantly painting. Her paintings were on masonite, the hard, pressed board you find at a hardware store. The masonite was then mounted on a wooden frame so it wouldn’t warp. She would then put layer after layer of gesso on each of these, sanding between each coat. When she began painting, the surface was shiny, hard, almost like glass or vinyl.

Then would come the stencil. She’d mark repeating patterns on the masonite with pencil. Then, with India ink, more lines, not repeating, here, there, figures. Then came the paint. There was often an underpainting in a color opposite of the final piece; she said it was how the paintings got the distinctive glowing backlit feeling so much of her work has. Then, layer after layer of acrylic paint, very thin, like washes, so thin and translucent that you could see the layer underneath. Some of her paintings had as many as thirty such layers. Sometimes I said, “You are providing work for hundreds of graduate students of the future. They’re going to have a field day discovering all the underpaintings with their sophisticated gizmos.”

Heather’s work was abstract until it wasn’t. If you kept looking, you’d see things. It has a kind of “Hidden Pictures” quality, where you’d see something, then look again, and not see something. Because of the many layers, her paintings looked different at every time of day and in different lights. In the morning a work like Ring (pictured above) would have a dominant color of teal green, luminous, like it was lit from behind. At midday, the red tones of the central ring figure came to the fore, glowing garnet.

She also created works on paper. First would come linework with India ink, using a pen with changeable nibs, dipped in a small well of ink. Then, colored pencil. There were the drawings I often called “the critters” — figures in the center of the page that seemed to have a personality. As time went on, the drawings expanded to fill the page. “My drawings and my paintings are merging. Maybe they will separate again someday and maybe they won’t.”

In 2016 she started doing what she called “infinity drawings” — drawings done on papier mache spheres, using the same techniques as her drawings: first, India ink, then layers of pigment from colored pencil. Some of these are small, the size of a baseball; one is large, cast on a yoga ball.

She had recently gotten gallery representation, a major step forward for her career, which she was thrilled about.

Eulogy for a fairy princess:

Once upon a time…

Once upon a time there was a fairy princess.

Most people did not know she was a fairy princess but that’s because most people are blockheads.

The children knew, though. Children loved her. Don’t children always know?

One rainy day we were walking down Thayer Street, where a man was asking for spare change in front of the coffeeshop and having a conversation with the sky. Upon seeing her, he dropped to his knees in a puddle and said,

O lady, my lady, my queen

That guy. He knew.

When they write

Once upon a time there was a fairy princess

They are writing about women like Heather.

But also when it is written:

“For who can find a virtuous woman,
For her price is above rubies,
And nothing thou canst desire can equal her,”

…they are also writing about women like Heather. Heather did not try to be good; she simply was good.

How do you pay tribute to a fairy princess?

Hug a child;
Plant a flower;
Sing a song;

But most especially: Try not to be such a jerk.

Because if we — even for a moment— can see through our selfishness and self-centeredness, our own little world that’s all about us — then maybe, we too, we mere commoners, we too can see, and be, the magic.

Here lies a fairy princess. My love, who I love.

If you liked this piece, please share or recommend it. I am putting this message in a bottle and throwing it in the wine-dark sea of the Interwebs; be a wave and push it along to whatever unknown shore Fate will take it.

Eulogy for a Fairy Princess was originally published in Be Yourself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi, Jason —

First, I want to thank you for inviting me into this conversation. Over the past few months I have been thinking about how much I miss Ye Olde Early Days of blogging, and with it the sense I had of being in extended conversation about ideas. Your recent piece, “Hi, Mary, Welcome To The Newsroom” gave me so much to think about and respond to.

I’d like to break my response to your piece into two parts — one, focusing on what people want out of journalism, and two, how we might respond to that.

My answers to this come out of the work I’m doing these days. Today I work at WBUR, a large NPR affiliate in Boston which produces a lot of nationally syndicated public radio content (Here and Now, OnPoint, Only A Game) and podcasts like Modern Love and Dear Sugar. Along with Meg Siegal, I am one half of an R&D unit working with people inside and outside the station to design projects that will help us figure out how to grow audience and engagement in a way that keeps public media thriving and sustainable.

The first thing we did was go out and talk to people. We spent many, many hours talking directly to people in focus groups, primarily non-listeners, young people, and people of color. The saddest thing I heard in those focus groups was this: when we asked people why they turned off the news, they said, “Because I can’t do anything about it.” My immediate response was: “Is this really where we want to drop people off?”

Your response to this was:

The assumption here is that “What can I do about it?” isn’t provided for in the act of journalism itself. That’s a mistake. The better answer to “What can I do about it?” is journalism.

Reading that, I thought, that sounds like an answer that works for journalists, but does it work for the people who are consuming the news? It sounds a lot like what I often hear from journalists when I ask what journalism is for: “so they can be informed.” That answer always seemed curiously truncated to me. To be informed…for what?

But I didn’t want to rush heedlessly past your suggestion, in large part because I know how smart you are, so I knew that there had to be something in there. It made me realize that “the answer to journalism is more journalism” is true IF we are talking about issues where simply shedding more light on them brings about a good result. This is true, for example, when the dealings of a corrupt politician are brought to light and they are turned out of office, as happened recently in Iceland, where the country’s prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, resigned after revelations resulting from investigative journalism into the Panama Papers (I have concerns over whether or not journalism is declining in its effectiveness in holding the powerful to account in similar circumstances in the U.S., but that will have to wait for another blog entry).

Of course, stories that do good simply by shedding more light on a subject do not have to have such a serious outcome: I benefit all the time, for example, from stories that shed light on good places to eat, or good books to read, or good music to listen to, or where I can go to see the world championships of indoor rowing, sign up for curling, eat at Drag Brunch, or exercise with others for free.

Lately I have been interested in the issues where simply shedding more light may not work, or work as well. In 2015, more Americans died of overdoses than car crashes. Here in Massachusetts where I live, the problem is particularly acute. I worry that simply writing one more story about how bad the opiate crisis is won’t do much to help those most affected.

Here’s where I veer off from you a little:

If you believe the problem is that journalism motivates people to act but doesn’t channel that motivation, you might respond with a prompt for engagement. Now that you’ve read the story, tell us what you think in the comments. Take this Twitter poll. Tweet a hashtag. Events, topical Facebook groups, and sharing your reaction with a reporter are more sophisticated options but follow the same logic.

You could not have known this, since we didn’t go on to discuss it, but when I wrote

…I wasn’t actually thinking of conventional “engagement” (leave a comment, tweet a hashtag, all the others you listed above and more). To go back to the example of covering the opiate crisis, which of these two formats for delivering the deeply reported fact-based information we provide would help the families most affected more:

1. A long, beautifully written/produced piece about an addict with an uncertain outcome

or

2. A three part online course: one segment on the science of addiction, one part where you get your questions answered by a social worker, and a third where you understand available treatment options and the political landscape around the issue?

The response I sometimes get to that is that #2 isn’t journalism. But why not? It informs and edifies people on a major public health and public policy issue. It just means the news bus is not dropping them off at the corner of Apathy Ave & Despair Drive.

Is journalism limited to a small set of forms — narrative text, video, audio, photos, maybe some charts and graphs? Is it only journalism if it’s designed to be passively consumed? This seems to me to be a rather limiting perspective.

Or what about health and science reporting? How could that be transformed for people to engage more deeply with this body of knowledge in ways that help them improve their own lives? We’re doing an experiment right now: instead of 21 stories about the benefits of exercise, the science behind it, and interesting people exercising in interesting ways, we’re shaping that into a 21 day exercise challenge that gets delivered to your inbox each morning in the form of a four minute podcast.

But I want to get to the part of your essay that I love the best: Harper the Welcome Bot. Oh, how I love Harper the Welcome Bot.

Each time your newsroom gets a new email address, at an event, through a web form, as a digital subscription, they meet Harper.

Hi Mary!

Thank you for getting in touch! The news you are looking for is the exact kind of thing our newsroom works with the community to deliver.

The stories we write are factual and inform readers about what is happening in our community, explaining complicated issues, bringing public records to light, and holding powerful figures accountable. Our journalists can report fearlessly and independently because they are trained professionals, and no one has control over what we publish.

To get started, please fill out our community survey. It will guide you through questions about your interests and the news you are seeking. Let me know if you have any questions as you go through it!

Happy we got connected!

Harper

Love it. And as we decide on our next batch of projects over here, I would be very surprised if a bot project was not on the list.

Lastly, I want to take a stab at a direct answer to the title of this piece. What is journalism for? I believe that journalism exists to inform people, but I think we shouldn’t stop there. I think we should choose the form and the interaction for that information that helps people put that knowledge into action individually where that makes sense, and collectively where that makes a better world.

Let’s keep talking —

Lisa

P.S.: “What Are Journalists For,” Jay Rosen’s book, is well worth the read.