Two Deaths, Too Soon
Two worthy men died too young. One was Kevin Drum, whose blog I read every day for years. Kevin died recently. The other was Brian Doyle, who wrote “One Long River Of Song: Notes On Wonder.” He died in 2017, also too young.
Kevin Drum started blogging in 2003. I began reading him when he was blogging for Mother Jones magazine. He left the magazine in 2021 to write independently on his blog Jabberwocking.
I appreciated his writing which was always grounded in logic and rationality. He built arguments with facts and always cited his sources. Wikipedia said that he often deflated “sensational headlines with statistics that showed historical continuity rather than any noteworthy change. A frequent theme was the leading role of Fox News in eroding public trust for American institutions.”
Another thing I appreciated about Kevin Drum was that he was an excellent photographer. He posted one of his photos, usually of scenes from southern California, every day. I asked, in a comment, what gear he used to create his crystal-clear photos. I was surprised when he replied. (He used Sony.)
For the last decade of his life, Drum fought cancer. He regularly blogged about the progress of the disease, his treatment, and his progress or lack thereof. On March 4th, 2025, he wrote a post titled “Health Update”:
Everything is getting worse. . . counts are getting worse, and I feel terrible. Nonetheless, they’re slow walking the immunoglobulin treatment, which I think is my only chance. These guys [his doctors] are going to kill me before they figure out what’s going wrong.
Three days later he died.
Six days later, Kevin’s wife Marian wrote the last post, “Health Update”.
With a heavy heart, I have to tell you that after a long battle with cancer my husband Kevin Drum passed away on Friday, March 7, 2025.
The other writer who died too soon is Brian Doyle, who died in 2017. I recently finished his collection of essays, “One Long River Of Song: Notes On Wonder.” It’s the first book in years that I rated with five stars.
I didn’t realize until almost the end of the book that Doyle died at age 60. What a loss! A loss of one who wrote so inspiringly and movingly of love, especially family love, belief, grace, and wonder. Here is Brian on living well:
Of course you do your absolute best to find and hone and wield your divine gifts against the dark. You do your best to reach out tenderly to touch and elevate as many people as you can reach. You bring your naked love and deviant courage and salty grace to bear as much as you can, with all the attentiveness and humor you can muster. This life is after all a miracle and we ought to pay fierce attention every moment, as much as possible.
You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw.
If I live with humility and intent, if I do what I do well and gracefully, that is good. Beyond that I cannot go. . . . all I can do is do what I do, either well or ill, patiently or not, gracefully or not. And I do find that doing things mindfully, patiently, easefully, makes the task far more interesting.
Brian’s wife Mary Miller Doyle wrote a final word in the book’s Acknowledgments. I will let her final words serve as mine.
To you, dear readers,
This extraordinary book your hands hold was made of more than paper and ink. It was made of admiration, altruism, awe, diligence, extension, generosity. It is a promise and a prayer. It is living proof that we are wise to hold compassion as our Lodestar and to believe that energy never ever is lost and that Brian Patrick Doyle stirred up so much love in this world that his companions gave of themselves to gather his far-flung brilliant essays from the corners of the world and tuck them between these covers so you might now know him more as we do, with his capacious humble heart, his soaring spirited stupendous mind, his tender copious humor, his feisty unfailing faith. Of course he had his foibles, was impossible to argue with, hummed through operas and meetings, was fond of repetition and being earlier than early at airports, but it was because of his relationship with time. He was attentive to and creative with it. He didn’t hurry or worry it either. He charmed it. His greatest joy was using his to delight you. I believe Brian had already been to heaven and back and found it irresistible not to return and restore astonishment, which is a sacrament, which is what you have just received.