It Takes Time To Grieve

The sum of a life ought to be more than a few rushed words.

Reflection takes time, after the mind stops racing and the heart can let in something other than a sorrow big enough to break it. But that's not how we acknowledge a loved one's passing.

Most death notices and obituaries are written on the fly and depend on current recollections from minds still reeling from loss. If the circumstances of the death make news, then someone else's demise becomes our knock-on-wood relief that we weren't in someone else's shoes.

Even the best eulogies can ring hollow because they fail to include this story or that moment or any number of special memories eclipsed by grief in that short period between consuming loss and moving on.

And so it was that my friend Michael Naidus sat down at his computer Tuesday night in Los Angeles to write everything he wished he'd said when reporters called to talk about his beloved friend, Tom Snyder.

The former late-night talk show host died on Sunday at the age of 71. Michael was Snyder's publicist at CBS from 1995 to 1999. They were friends until the day Snyder died.

"You would have liked my friend Tom," his letter began.

Michael felt he had tried, and failed, to convey why Tom Snyder mattered. Yes, the stories mentioned the talk show host's quick wit and generous curiosity, and how he talked through the camera to close the distance between him and his viewers. But they missed so much of the man.

"I wanted to tell (one reporter) about watching Tom ride the cable cars in San Francisco, as happy as if he were 7 again, a train aficionado in his element at long last on one sunny weekend morning," he wrote.

He also wished he had talked about the time they walked into a hotel room in Philadelphia so that Snyder could wash up before an interview.

"We opened the door, and bam , framed in the window, two naked men in mid-kiss. 'Well, hello!' one of the men said. We laughed at 'Hello!' for the next five years."

Michael is 43 now and a producer for CBS' "Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson." He spent Monday rifling through his boxes of videotapes searching for "just the right 30 seconds of footage" for a segment about Snyder.

The clip was OK. But still …

"It's missing so much. There's nothing … about the night Tom tore off his microphone and walked into the control room, exasperated at a guest on satellite in New York who wouldn't stop yakking. 'There's no air in the studio,' he said."

So much was missing.

There was the night Michael cried as he watched Snyder gently lead Gloria Vanderbilt through the events of the night her son attempted suicide.

And there was the ailing Canadian woman who called in at least once a week on the "toll-free superhighway." Her name was "Debi from Ottawa," and when her calls suddenly stopped, Snyder was the one who cried.

None of the stories mentioned Snyder's devotion to his mother, either, how he kept her supplied with new hairnets and fresh bottles of a distilled beverage he called "V-1."

And nobody else knows how Snyder gave Michael a peek into his own potential.

"Who do I tell about how much it meant to me when, one night in the radio booth, after I rushed in to help with some information, Tom was the first who told me that I 'think like a producer' and that was my future? Or about how, in the middle of all his craziness, he took a quiet night off to sit with my father and me at a local chophouse? About what it means to have your boss tell your father how terrific you are?"

That's the Tom Snyder he wants everyone to know.

"I really tried to do my friend justice today, and I'm not sure I did," Michael wrote at the end. "And so I'm sitting here at 1 in the morning — that was his time, 1 a.m. — wondering what I could have done better, wondering what I didn't think of, what I didn't say …"

These are the questions of a man who was rushed to think.

His stories are the answers of a friend who took time to grieve.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… And His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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