Casey Medal Winner Beth Macy: "Another Sad Parting"
Beth Macy, families' beat reporter for the Roanoke (Va.) Times, followed the caregiving journey of dementia patient Tommy Rhodes and his wife Linda for nearly two years. Macy and a team from the Times won a 2009 Casey Medal in the multimedia category for "Age of Uncertainty," their project about Roanoke's aging population. Tommy Rhodes died Dec. 25, and Macy wrote his obituary. Here, she reflects on the couple and on reader reaction to the project.
I was home in Roanoke for Christmas, just about to dive into presents at our uncle’s house when I noticed a voicemail on my phone: Tommy Rhodes had died an hour before, and his wife, Linda, had wanted me to know.
We knew it would probably happen before the year was out, Linda and I, which is why I had already written most of his obituary (which follows below) before I left my newspaper in August, with her blessing. “There’ll be just one more story,” she told me. “The last one.”
So it was that I sadly wrote the ending to a story I’d been following for the better part of two years — ever since Linda and I met at the Adult Care Center of Roanoke Valley in the fall of 2007, and she agreed to let me into her life. She’d already been on the caregiving journey for five years at that point and was struggling, she admitted, to keep Tommy at home. When the time came to put him in a nursing home, how would she know it was the right thing to do? What I proceeded to witness for the next several months would astonish me. Her devotion, chronicled in a March 2008 story, astonished droves of readers, too: Friends she hadn’t seen in years volunteered to mow her grass; strangers accosted her at CVS and in the dentist’s office, saying, “You’re that lady in the paper, aren’t you?” And: “You’re amazing.”
One reader donated a bidet after reading that Linda needed one to help with Tommy’s toileting. After an end-of year-update nine months later revealed that she was trying to sell her house — in order to pay her home-care aide, at a pricetag that’s well beyond the reach of most middle-class families — a reader in Stuart mailed me a $700 check to give to her. Linda was floored.
My aunt Barbara told me once that she admired the way I “fall in love” with my subjects. That’s not my goal, of course, but it happens, especially when it’s someone as honest and down-to-earth and smart as Linda Rhodes. I’ve learned that in order to render the intimate details of a person’s life, you have got to get in there deep and talk about the hard stuff, like what it was like not to dial 9-1-1 the night she thought he was dying and what she said the day he’d gotten himself kicked out of day care for kicking another patient. Columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote that empathy is the key to human understanding, and that’s my simple goal: to understand a person or a situation so well that I can render it fully. I can’t help it if falling in love is sometimes a byproduct.
Last summer, when the “Age of Uncertainty” team won a national award for the series — much of it due to the Linda Rhodes’ story — we turned the check over to her, a small way to say thanks. Again, she was floored. And then she went out and did something that shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone: She spent the most of the money buying us gifts.
Beth Macy is Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. This post originally appeared on her blog, Intrepid Paper Girl.
