ArcaMax

A 99-year-old woman died yesterday. Though I'd never met her, I cried as I read her obituary.

Her name was Marilyn Hagerty, and even as a nonagenarian, she was still writing the same gentle restaurant reviews that had made her briefly but brilliantly famous.

She wasn't famous in the new way -- she wasn't on TikTok, and she didn't have a podcast -- but I'd heard of her, and you might have, too.

Over a decade ago, she wrote a review in The Grand Forks Herald of an Olive Garden that had just opened in the North Dakota town. Its generous tone, praising the "impressive" Tuscan farmhouse decor and commenting favorably on the fettuccine alfredo portions, at first made her an object of scorn, then one of praise.

The celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, not typically found taking up the banner of chain restaurants, rose to her defense, ultimately writing the forward to a collection of her reviews, a book he said, "kills snark dead."

In Mrs. Hagerty's obituary, I read about her start in journalism at a small-town South Dakota newspaper, where she, upon finishing school, watched as two men hired with her were assigned to cover police and regional affairs. She was given a job assisting the elderly society editor.

"I didn't go to college" to be an assistant, she told her editor.

She never sought fame and didn't seem overly interested when it found her anyway. She kept writing, her children said, virtually until the very end of her life, never abandoning discovery, never setting aside the possibility of growth.

I was sad reading the story of her life, partly because Marilyn Hagerty represents the kind, earnest, interconnected world that dies a little more each day.

Replacing it is one that's cruel, funny and selfish.

Even our assassins can't stomach being taken seriously, writing on their bullet casings obscure video game references and jokes like, "If you read this, you are gay LMAO," the skibidi toilet of manifestos.

We now get political killers who are fine with the moral implications of taking a human life but who are horrified at the thought of standing for anything other than the lulz.

Everyone has spent so much time talking about the political beliefs of the assassin that they're ignoring the society that created him. He was forged in the fires of internet insanity, a molten mixture of callousness and malicious revelry -- no different, in many ways, from thousands of other young men and boys living lives between lines of code.

His antithesis, in every way, was a woman who spent her life in the pursuit of connection -- connection to her neighbors, and through them, to the world.

Marilyn Hagerty's son told The Washington Post, where he works as an obituary writer, that his mother's greatest gift and professional passion didn't lie in food criticism. She loved features writing, a journalistic pursuit that, when done right, runs on empathy. The research teaches you to care for your subjects and then give them to your readers to care for, too.

Mrs. Hagerty was the kind of person who pushes together, the assassin the type who pulls apart.

Without ever having met either one of them, much is clear.

The assassin was a bawling mass of fear trying to disguise itself as rage. He stumbled around the online ether, looking for truth. I suppose he never considered finding it in the warmth of an Olive Garden fireplace, eating a humble pasta dish.

Because truth is there, too. It's pretty much everywhere, honestly, if you can just be still, be quiet, turn off the phone, look around you. If you can be there.

Marilyn Hagerty's writing showed that she was capable of being fully where she was -- perhaps more importantly, who she was. She could breathe in her surroundings and pause, silently, waiting for goodwill to inspire her. Then she could put it to paper and give the goodwill to someone else to pass along, too.

Creation and destruction are forever at odds.

Maybe it's a sacrilege to mention these two people in the same breath, one dying, one killing, but I can't help but think they're signs of what we're losing and what is taking its place.

I resent it, giving up the Marilyn Hagertys of the world and getting this infamous killer instead.

I find it a sorry, sorry trade.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

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