Sarah Haas, Nederland. I walked into Barbara Lawlor’s house for the first time on July 12, 2018, the day after she’d been diagnosed with terminal leukemia. There were eight people inside, all laughing: two of her four children, two of someone else’s, two friends, her, and I. The house seemed used to being this full and happy.
But I entered solemnly, after all I’d come with the morbid agenda of interviewing Barbara before she passed away so I could write about her when she did. It was a bit awkward but it seemed important, to all of us, that she played some part in writing her own memorial.
Since 1983, Barbara has been the eyes, ears and voice of Nederland and its surrounding mountain towns. As The Mountain-Ear’s lead journalist and columnist she’s written thousands of stories, performed over 9,000 interviews, and written over 1,000 first-person columns. It’s hard to imagine any story about the area without her being a part of its telling. And so it was my hope, however drab, to captivate the significance of her contributions while they still lived within her, a woman I was coming to adore.
Just six months ago I had idolized a different sort of hero. Perhaps because of my still young age and still youthful ambitions, I’d looked to writers with fame, fortune, and followers as distant mentors without regard for where their values led me. But life happened and instead of following urban ambitions, I moved to the mountains in pursuit of love, writing for writing’s sake, and life’s simple pleasures. Firmly on that trajectory, it was only a matter of time before I met Barbara Lawlor.
We first met in January 2018, when she came to interview me for a story and we spent two hours forgetting what we were there to talk about, conversing instead about our lives as writers. We talked about the art of finding little details that illuminated the universal. We talked about our time spent in cities, hers in Los Angeles, mine in New York. We talked about the call of the mountains and the poetry of wood-burning stoves. We talked about tradeoffs and about family and about the wealth of art and poverty.
The second time I saw her was on July 12, and even though it was interspersed with tears that anticipated the end, the day appeared like an impromptu celebration of all of the details that boil down to life. Everyone talked about memories and medications, except for Barbara who sat quietly with her eyes closed, listening, while her daughter-in-law to be brushed and braided her hair.
In that moment, as in all the others, Barbara was a listener and an observer. Even as a kid she stood apart from the others, watching and wondering what they were talking about, what they were doing, and always asking why.
“I was endlessly curious in what others were doing,” she said to me once. “I think because I don’t usually understand why people do what they do and I wanted to understand what I was missing. Now though, I just like to be there, to see people, and to recognize what’s happening by paying attention and putting it in into words.”
By the time her hair was braided Barbara had grown tired and left the group to lay down in bed inviting a few of us to join her. Her bedroom was just big enough to fit her king sized bed and still, it looked like it was among the most used and visited rooms in the house.
Just off the dining room and the connected kitchen, Barbara’s room was situated at the edges of the heart of the action, in her home, just like she’s always been around town. On that day though, she was not the observer on the periphery, but the epicenter, as friends, family, a cat, a dog, and I, a nosy writer, piled into her bed.
The others huddled close together, looking at photos of her as a young woman, her hair long and silver even then, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of her, her thick skin, wrinkled with a life well-lived. Looking at her, I felt an inevitability in my bones. I didn’t know Barbara well, I wasn’t in her inner circle, but I saw myself in her, and for the first time in my life I felt death, not as some vague potentiality, but as a matter of fact. Her life had, indeed, boiled down and it seemed impossible to try to describe it, only to recognize the love swirling around her. I looked around, but to realize the room had emptied. It was just Barbara and me.
She opened her eyes and saw me looking at her and said: “I hate curtains.”
“Why?” I asked, noticing her windows had none.
“Open the windows. Watch the clouds and the trees swaying in the breeze… and they want me to be treated in a hospital…”
“You said no?”
“I said ‘Heck no!”” She closed her eyes again, wincing in an invisible pain.
“Something is happening to my mind. I close my eyes and I’m immersed in these scenes from my life and I watch them unfold until I remember them. It’s odd. I’m dying and learning more about living than I have in my whole life. Everyday, all these little choices — suddenly they add up to something.”
Listening to her I was tempted to assign her a wisdom that can only be accessed near death’s door, forgetting that Barbara has always been this wise.
I was once gifted a book of her columns, “When I Grow Up: Reflections on a Mountain Life,” a documentation of 20 years spent raising four children as a single mother in the mountains. Each column is deeply personal and yet generous to her readers, 750 word attempts to dig deeply into her life to find camaraderie in life’s truths.
In the 1989 column, “Talking to Plants Runs in the Family,” she writes about the tilling of the garden like the tilling of life. She opens with the lede: “Whenever I squat in turned over dirt, trowel in hand, cold water turning the soil to mud, I think of my mother.” The column a contemplation of the passing of generations, of her own motherhood, her own children who begged her to leave the garden saying, “C’mon, Mom. The world is calling to us.”
She ends: “I wonder if they’ll think I am abandoning them when they are grown and call for help and I don’t answer. I wonder if they’ll think I care more about my flowers because I stay home and let them figure out things for themselves.
“They probably will. And I’ll probably just smile to myself, don some unfashionable shorts, squat in a patch of mud and putz in my garden. And maybe, every now and then, my lips will move and I’ll be heard muttering, maybe even humming to my plants.”
In her writing, an expression of her perspective on life, Barbara was always courageous. Lucky us, for in her columns and articles we didn’t just get to read the goings on about town, but about the magic and mystery of life — her words seeds of our own brilliant little moments.
Now that she has passed, we will all sharply feel the void of the woman who’s name appeared in byline after byline, issue after issue, for as long as many of us can remember. Sure, someone else will write the stories and curate a living history of our mountain life, but still we will grieve the absence of her voice as our guiding light.
When we were sitting in her bed I asked if anything about dying scared her, to which she offered a sharp: “No.”
“…except, of course, I fear not being able to write for the paper.”
From the next room, the paper’s publisher Barbara Hardt offered reassurance: “The paper will be fine, somehow.”
“How can it be fine if I’m not a part of it?”
I think we all know this conundrum, we all know we will be fine without Barbara Lawlor, and also that we won’t. Barbara dedicated over 35 years to documenting and exploring not just her life but yours, ours, in both the ethereal and literal sense. Which is to say she showed up, not just to her kids’ events, but to your kids’ events, not just to her big moments, but to yours, because she knew that they were all inherently valuable and worth paying attention to.
One of the most pressing questions of our age is of the meaning and importance of journalism. As a nation we wonder which voices to trust and which stories matter and if, in our divided country, there is such a thing as truth.
Barbara Lawlor is truth’s exemplar. Not because she always got every detail right, but because she let every detail matter. Every story was for the greater good, every sentence an exploration of the world as she saw it, every word an offering to a life well-lived. And I, for one, am eternally grateful for having lived in the presence of such a hero who showed up everyday to call our attention to the little things as the only things that matter.
There will be a Celebration of Life for Barbara Lawlor in June of 2019.
Do you have a favorite story about Barbara? A photo you’d like to share? Would you like to be included on a list for further information and celebration of life time and date (June 2019)? Simply email publisher1977@gmail.com.
