My sister Heather is a printer. So she knows the value of words. As she works in her print shop, she sets each word by hand, letter by letter, line by line.
Recently, I was grieving because a friend had died.

Heather sent me this short, powerful poem called “Voices in the Air” by Naomi Shihab Nye:
 

People do not pass away.

They die

and then they stay.
 

These words comforted me.

I learned by reading a story Nancy Churnin had written for The Dallas Morning News, a newspaper Ms. Nye’s father, a Palestinian-American, had once written for, that the poet was my age. After her father died in 2007, she told Ms. Churnin, she felt his presence so strongly while she was driving that she pulled off to the side of the road and wrote “Voices in the Air.”

We know that feeling. We carry with us people we were close to, even after they are dead.

One of the things we most value in owning a newspaper is being able to print obituaries at no charge. We believe everyone in our community deserves to be remembered, not just the people whose families can afford to pay.

We sometimes weep as we edit obituaries or as we talk to the family and friends of someone who has died. When we write about people we have known, it is particularly painful but also particularly worthwhile.

The people we write about are real and vivid to us in the here and now — like Ms. Nye, we feel their presence. But we like to think we are creating a record, too, for future generations.

Years ago, on a family trip to Bermuda, where my grandmother was born and raised, I spent hours in a library, poring over microfilm to find newspaper accounts of my long-dead relatives. When I at last found the obituary of a man four generations before my grandmother, I was bitterly disappointed. The flowery account told nothing about him as a person.

As this year, 2023, draws to a close, we have sifted through our weekly editions to review the news in the towns that we cover. It seems fitting that here we should also review some of the lives that were lost this year, a few of the many people who have “stayed,” as Ms. Nye put it, not just for their families and friends but for the larger community.

Chief George Pratt, Altamont’s cowboy, died on April 3 at the age of 94.

He wore a stetson hat and cowboy boots that made his lean frame seem even taller. In his old age, he worked as a cowboy on the Florida range after retiring from a 20-year career as Altamont’s police chief.

For Mr. Pratt, the cowboy’s life embodied a personal credo of overcoming hardship and participating in the arena of life.

His early life was not an easy one. “My father was dead. My mother raised us,” he said of himself and his two siblings. “I was an adult when I was 7,” Mr. Pratt had told us. “I was milking cows, driving a team of horses, and farming.”

He joined the State Guard at age 15. “My mother was in the hospital at the time and she didn’t realize the paper she was signing,” he said of his early admittance to the military. He went on to serve in the Navy during World War II.

After he retired from his decades as Altamont’s police chief, Mr. Pratt spent four months of each year, from January to April, in Florida, working as a cowboy. “It’s a way of life that’s hard and dangerous,” he said.

Asked why he liked it, Mr. Pratt paused for a long time and said, “A friend of mine said, if I got along with humans the way I get along with horses, I’d be a good person.”

Over the decades, Mr. Pratt wrote scores of letters to the Enterprise editor, often inspiring editorials in opposition to them. He liked coming to the newsroom to debate issues both political and personal.

We hardly ever agreed with Mr. Pratt, but we miss him.

After we published Mr. Pratt’s obituary, we received a column from the thoughtful director of the Altamont Free Library, Joe Burke. Mr. Burke is thoughtful in both senses of the world — he thinks deeply and he is kind.

He wrote that “not much more needs to be said” about Mr. Pratt and went on to memorialize others in Altamont who had recently died: Anne Burby, “a devoted library user, a prolific volunteer, a kind and generous soul”; Mary Hughes, “active in nearly every aspect of community life … a voracious reader and a warm and gentle presence”; and David Silver and Charlie Russell, “who found a welcoming home in Altamont later in their lives — both were great readers, and all-around great guys.”

Mr. Burke wrote that living in a tight community like Altamont is double-edged: “We get to enjoy the joys of comfort and familiarity, but we also have the sadness that comes when any member of our community leaves us.”

In June, Mr. Burke hosted a ceremony to name a library patio for Dick and Ellen Howie. Mr. Howie died in 2021 in their 63rd year of marriage and Mrs. Howie, still exuberantly alive, cut the ribbon for the new patio.

Mr. Burke said of the Howies, “Their goal was to help their neighbors and to make their little piece of the world a better, kinder, and more humane place.”

He also said, “My hope is that, by naming this patio after them, we will be able to hold onto the example that Dick and Ellen have set of stewardship, and volunteerism, and community-heartedness for generations to come.”

That is indeed a concrete and worthwhile way to have people “stay” with us — a physical reminder of their contributions.

John Wolcott’s work and words also helped secure a legacy the rest of us will long benefit from.

He died on Thursday, Aug. 17, 2023, a month shy of his 91st birthday.

Mr. Wolcott was an expert at reading maps — through layers and layers of history — and also an expert at reading the land, particularly the land that formed his beloved pine bush.

He shared his knowledge and passion with others, helping to save important landmarks and to preserve Albany County’s globally rare pine barrens.

​​His longtime friends, Lynne Jackson and her husband, Daniel Van Riper, described him as a “historian, preservationist, activist, and fierce advocate for the Pine Bush.”

Both Ms. Jackson and Mr. Wolcott were founding members of the not-for-profit organization that, since 1978, has raised consciousness about the worth of the pine bush and fought to protect it from encroaching development.

We knew John Wolcott mostly through his words, through his decades of writing letters to us. 

Sometimes his words were fiery, as when he wrote to us in December 2009, “A portion of the pine bush is being savagely torn up.”

But many times Mr. Wolcott’s words were filled with a different kind of warmth, not of fire but of love and understanding. This came through as, for decades, he regularly wrote of hikes that he would lead or organize.

While promoting an Earth Day hike in the pine bush, Mr. Wolcott wrote, “As with Christmas, we shouldn’t limit love, kindness, generosity, and helping the needy to one day. So with Earth Day, we need all year to act and speak out for our concern for the Earth and the ways it sustains everyone’s lives and the moreso if it’s treated better and understood better.”

When we followed him as he led a hike, by reading the landscape through Mr. Wolcott’s eyes, hearing what he had researched from maps, we saw in a new way sights that had once seemed mundane.

Mr. Wolcott was someone who knew how to find the wonder in our world and share it with others.

 
Other ways of “staying” may be less tangible than a library patio or a conserved pine bush but are equally important.

Donald Meacham, who died on May 16, just 12 days short of his 91st birthday, worked as a lawyer and touched every facet of Voorheesville life.

“He really helped people, even people who never paid him. One time, he took a pig for a fee,” said his wife, Lauren Meacham.

Mrs. Meacham listed his serving as the village attorney as well as the lawyer for the zoning and planning boards, and offering counsel to the rod and gun club, the school board, the library board, the American Legion post, the Mt. Pleasant Cemetery Association, the New Salem fire department, and serving as a board member for the New Scotland Historical Society.

Being a sole practitioner, Mr. Meacham handled all sorts of legal matters. “He didn’t like divorce cases,” said his wife. “He liked adoptions and real estate.” She described him as “kind, honest, and funny.”

Another person who served her community, the Guilderland school community, was Alicia M. Rizzo.

She had a passion for teaching and persevered as principal of Lynnwood Elementary School despite having cancer.

“A strong and fearless leader” is how her family described her.

“A strong advocate for children and an exceptional educator” is how the Guilderland schools superintendent described her.

She died on Aug. 7 at the age of 54.

“Mothers can do anything,” said Ms. Rizzo. And so she could. Her breast cancer was first diagnosed, at Stage 3, at the end of her first year as Lynnwood’s principal. She did chemotherapy, and spent seven years cancer-free. The disease returned in January 2019.

The entire staff and faculty made a video for her with the soundtrack of Martina McBride’s “I’m Gonna Love You Through It.” One line in the song says, “When you’re weak, I’ll be strong.” Ms. Rizzo said that those words encapsulated the way Lynnwood works, with people supporting and pitching in for one another.

By 2020, Ms. Rizzo’s breast cancer had reached Stage 4 — the breast cancer had metastasized to her lungs, bone, and liver — and her husband had recently been diagnosed with Stage 4 brain cancer.

“He apparently wanted to compete with me,” Ms. Rizzo quipped at the time. “He didn’t want me to be a 4 without being a 4.”

Still, she returned to work as Lynnwood’s principal. “Sometimes I don’t feel great,” she said, “but work is the best medicine.”

Earlier this month, we wrote of our family’s hero, Syd Dunston, who died on Dec. 3 at the age of 88.

He was more than a mechanic who kept us and many others, including Enterprise reporters, on the road. He was more than an environmentalist ahead of his time, recycling car parts instead of junking them.

He was a kind and generous person who patched up people as well as cars.

He is the reason my sister sent me Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem.

We’ll repeat it here and you should, too. It helps:
 

People do not pass away.

They die

and then they stay.