By Doug Barker

Editor, The Daily World

Death, and the grief that comes with it, have been on my mind lately.

A week or so ago, my best friend of more than 50 years passed away in a hospital in San Diego. He was trying to get strong enough to go through a heart transplant and just wore out before he could get there — ironic in that he was so big-hearted.

He was a great guy. Big guy who was a softie, hard not to like and respect. He was a history teacher who loved history and a world traveler who inspired kids to expand their own worlds. He was a football coach. I once asked him whether another coach was any good, thinking he was going to tell me about wins and losses. He said he tended to judge coaches by how many kids they got to turn out. It gave me a new way to see things.

He and his wife didn’t have children of their own, but as can happen in small towns built around school communities, they were honorary parents to every kid, some more than others. I wrote his obituary, and it included two children and three grandchildren because he had acted like a dad for a young couple whose real dads didn’t.

Coincidentally, I’m learning more about another death, someone I didn’t know at all. About a year ago, two people died in a crash between Montesano and Aberdeen when the car they were in hit a state snowplow making a U-turn on the highway. We wrote about it at the time and had a follow-up the same weekend my friend died. The man driving the car died, along with one of his passengers, Michelle Sorensen. The driver had drugs in his system and had just checked out of rehab.

The State Patrol report noted that Michelle had used drugs in the past and that, too, was in our story — at my direction. If you only knew her from that story, that’s all you’d know about her. You wouldn’t know that she was clean for 13 years, that she worked her way through college and earned a bachelor’s degree during that time, had three kids and worked at a social service agency in a job designed to help families stay together.

Her family, still grieving, was upset that it seemed to boil her life down to a drug problem when they knew her as so much more, and knew how hard she’d worked to stay clean. The story we ran, though necessary, included information that wasn’t — again, at my direction — since she wasn’t the driver. It made a family’s grief that much worse.

Under any circumstances, it wouldn’t have been hard to understand how they felt; but given my own grief, it was hard to bear, hard to distinguish where grief for my friend and regret for adding to the grief of others started and stopped.

There is something to learn here. If we haven’t already, we will all experience grief, and we all deserve kindness, patience, courtesy and care. There are times in this job when those things, by necessity, are casualties to the details of the news. My experience with Michelle Sorensen, who I never met, gives me a new way to see things.