Column 6

If you have read as much as you want to about Tim Russert, bear with me for a few more words.  If you don’t know, about six weeks ago, at age 58, Russert, who had hosted “Meet the Press” since 1991 and had a successful career as a political pundit and author, had a heart attack while at work and died.

People find Russert’s death tragic because it happened too early in his life, leaving his 22-year old son to live far too much of his own life without the support and guidance of his beloved father. The loss his family has suffered is indeed a hard one.  Our imaginations flinch from how we ourselves might be able to bear such a sudden, enormous calamity.

Nevertheless, research shows that most Americans actually hope to die the way Russert did – suddenly, without a painful, difficult or frightening illness, or physical or mental decline – but at age 98, rather than at age 58.  The reality is that most people don’t die that way.  

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently published final data for 2005 on how we Americans die.  Just under 2.5 million of us died that year.  About a third of that number died from some form of heart disease, still the number one cause of death in America.  But only a relative few of those – about 165,000 – died suddenly, as Tim Russert did.  Most of the others died of more chronic heart conditions, after a little or a lot of time.  In fact, the vast majority of those who died in 2005 had time, quite a lot of time in most cases, living with the conditions that would ultimately become the cause of their deaths. 

And that leads to the most important question we can ask in trying to make sense of Tim Russert’s untimely death.  Since we will all die at some time in the future, what do we do with the time we have before that happens?   Tim Russert’s life offers an answer.

Of the thousands of words that have been published and broadcasted about Tim Russert since his death, the most important may have been spoken by Russert’s wife, journalist Maureen Orth.  In an interview in “People” magazine, Orth described her husband as “a man comfortable in his own skin.”  She repeated a sentiment expressed in one form or another by all of his media colleagues, the politicians he interviewed, former employees, just about everyone who had anything to say – “Tim was a happy man,” this grieving wife said. “He realized all of his dreams.”

As an epitaph, I can’t think of any better, or one that I would wish more for myself and everyone I care about.