The gift of friendship

My good friend Joel Havemann died the other day. No, he wasn’t a victim of the coronavirus. Since early 1990 at age 46, he had been battling Parkinson’s disease, a struggle that he was bound to lose. The more he succeeded in prolonging life, the weaker he would become at the end of life. As his strength dissipated, he would become less and less capable of fending for himself.
The end was grim. For roughly five years, he was helpless. He lost control of his body. He could not walk; he could not talk; he could not feed himself; he could not read. He spent most days confined to a wheelchair or a reclining chair. How much he understood of the life around him was a mystery. He occasionally muttered an intelligible word or phrase.
“Perplexing,” he said recently. What did he mean? No one knew. His wife, Judy, and others, including me, thought it might mean that he was still listening and understanding.
“Sad” is how most of Joel’s friends and mine described his ordeal. This was obviously true. Not only was his life tragically shortened, but the illness was accompanied by unrelenting psychic and physical suffering. But that is — in my view — the wrong way to understand Joel’s unfair fate. There is a larger lesson that applies, in one way or another, to us all.
We risk letting the end of life — its random cruelty — define the whole of life. The truth is that Joel’s life is worth celebrating. It was fulfilling in every meaningful way. He and Judy raised four terrific kids. Joel was widely respected by his journalist peers. He was a superb reporter and editor, the author of two admired books: “Congress and the Budget” (1978), and “A Life Shaken: My Encounter with Parkinson’s Disease” (2002).
Joel was very smart. At Harvard, he majored in math. He once courted Judy by “showing her how to prove that the square root of two is an irrational number (that is, it can’t be
written as a fraction).” Otherwise, he rarely flaunted his intelligence. He could have had his choice of lucrative careers but selected journalism, apparently influenced by his father, who was a successful magazine writer.
Alice Porter, an editor who once worked with Joel, says simply that he was “the nicest man in the world.” That’s an understatement. My adult daughter is now reading the Parkinson’s book, which is part memoir and part history. What struck her was Joel and Judy’s fearlessness. In 1990, after his diagnosis and with three young children in tow, they decamped to Brussels, where Joel became the Los Angeles Times’ European economic correspondent. They would not be cowed by Parkinson’s.
Joel and I connected in 1976 at the National Journal, a small magazine specializing in public-policy issues. He had been a reporter for the Oregonian and the Chicago Sun-Times. I was coming off almost four years as a freelancer. Later, I began writing a regular column for The Washington Post and Newsweek.
Joel was an exceptional editor and, over several decades, edited hundreds of those columns. Three qualities, I believe, define the best editors.
First is a respect for and command of the language; second is some grasp of the substance of the written piece; and finally there’s the ability to persuade writers to make changes without destroying their self-confidence.
Joel had all three. As a reporter, he had covered the federal budget; this gave him an exhaustive knowledge of government. His prose was clear-cut and concise; there was nothing flashy or fancy about it. And reporters did not find him threatening. His job was to make us look better.
He certainly did that for me. I can’t recall how many times he asked, “Are you sure you want to say this?” (Translation: “Your readers already consider you nuts. Why give them more ammunition?”) Our politics were different; that never got in the way.
All this relates to the larger point. There is going to be a lot of dying in America in the coming decades. We’re already getting a foretaste of this with the spread of the coronavirus. As baby boomers pass into their late 60s and 70s, most of us (I am 74; Joel was 76) face unavoidable questions of what we have done with our lives and whether it mattered.
We must not make this an exercise in unbounded pessimism that casts today’s pains as an accurate portrait of life’s entire narrative. Joel lived a largely fulfilling and successful life. He kept his Parkinson’s at bay long enough to see two of his daughters married and two grandchildren born. For the rest of us, he left the gift of his friendship. Thanks, Joel.

—The Washington Post

Robert J Samuelson writes a twice-weekly economics column. Both appear online, and one usually runs in The Washington Post in print on Mondays. He was a
columnist for Newsweek magazine from 1984 to 2011