The Brutal Importance of Accuracy

All my Best People,  June 2018

In the last week, I have had to tell nineteen new people about Hannah.

My job gives me the summer off, so there is a lot of naive enthusiasm of “how was your summer?” that needs to be navigated. And I have about thirty college students who work for me, and I felt that in the first meetings I have with them each, I should explain why I may be a hot mess this year.

One of the folks I told, a professor rather than a college kid, said that he'd read an article about Hannah online in a running magazine post.

“Oh, that one?” I said. “They got her wrong, they said she slipped. She didn’t slip. They corrected things eventually, but they got it wrong at first.” An edge of hysteria sharpened as my words came out faster and the professor backed off making desultory conversation about how he'd read a sad story about a woman who turned out to be my sister. She is my sister, Emily’s sister, Mom’s daughter, Will’s lady, the beloved family and dear friend of many, and a coach and mentor and person to more people than can be counted.

Hannah is too much to be a quick one-offed news story.

I know that this running magazine wrote about her online. I know this because Olof and Whitney called me in a fury because the writer had gotten permission to use Summit Nordic photos, had been offered the contact information for Olof—who has the desolate honor of sharing Hannah’s last hours, minutes, seconds—and then the writer just copied and pasted together the words of earlier articles in other papers, including the misinformation that Hannah slipped.

The words “she didn’t slip” are important to me. It’s a bitter little mantra, something that I can breathe in and out to while bawling, which I do best when I’m alone in my car.

It matters that she didn’t slip, because Hannah was not out of her depth or beyond her abilities. One rock crumbled in her hand, another hit her head. It is stark and it is random and it gives me night and daymares, but it is the truth.

It’s somehow easier when a person dies in the mountains to tell a story of hubris. It’s especially easy and common and untrue with women who die in wild places, to paint them as dumb Bambis who just weren’t strong enough or experienced enough to be where they were.

There is also the more awestruck bro-y rationale that, “well, they knew the risks and they went for it anyway,” as if there was some mystic purity in being a martyr to the Spirit of Adventure. This seems to give comfort to the same sort of idiots who offer up the “at least they went doing something they loved” platitude. When I wrote that Hannah’s death was as random as walking into a grocery store, past a display of watermelons and being hit in the head, imagine the idiocy of a person saying that there was to be some comfort in “at least…she always loved watermelons.”

To make it a question of skill or preparedness or even of belonging in the outdoors puts the possibility of any of us going so quickly and randomly far away. “I would be prepared,” we can say. “I wouldn’t do that, go there, make that choice…”

Any of us would. Any of us could. Some of us may. I was fussing with a hose today, watering the flowering tree my grandmother has given my mother as a memorial to Hannah—something pretty, that will grow. The tree is planted right next to the porch Hannah painted in the days before Emily’s wedding. The margin between lacing up your sneakers for another hike and having your family choose a species of tree to memorialize you is less than razor thin, and none of us are as in control of our own fates as we imagine.

But that is not the point. The point is that death is awful and permanent and painful for those who remain. (I have no ideas about how it is for those who go—I only hope it doesn’t hurt as much for Hannah to be without us.) If words are one of the only ways to do justice to a life, to tell the stories that keep a memory alive, that send little girls flocking to roller skis, that get teenage boys punch-dancing to Taylor Swift, that make us all dig a little deeper to live a little better and be stronger and kinder and go farther to keep the world from being too lonely for all that Hannah brought to it…if all that is the case, then it is crucially important to get the words right.

I write. I like words. I like when I find the ones that can give needle-like accuracy to the feelings I want to convey. I know I get it right when it feels clean and when people say "that's just what I felt, but I didn't have the words," and we can connect over the shared experience of whatever it is to be human.

When professional writers use their platform and words wrongly or poorly, I am deeply furious and offended at the tools being put to uses beneath their power. Objectively, Hannah made a great news story for papers in Colorado and New Hampshire and for running and skiing and adventure race forums. Beautiful white girl dies in tragic dramatic accident in mountains. Boom. Probably there is a formula for how many more likes you get on an article based on the wattage of the girl’s smile. Hannah’s was a million.

I wish all of this attention had come to her in life, because she hasn’t been made extraordinary by death. She was even more so in life. Everything that is now listed as an accomplishment and evidence of a vibrant life…she was doing all of that which is now missed and celebrated and mourned, all of it unsung, underpaid, and often unnoticed.

And, as that is impossible now, I wish that newspaper writers and online magazine compilers would show a little more humanity and responsibility in their writing about death. I wish that the two local New Hampshire papers had gotten in touch with my mother before she went out to grab her paper from the driveway and saw the front-page story that highlighted Hannah’s local roots, yet did not mention her local family. That the Colorado papers had waited for the official report from the Coroner’s Office before writing anything about how Hannah died, because those small errors were compounded each time another lazy writer used those stories as a base, rather than doing their own research. That, if Hannah was a news story on the local New England news, someone at WMUR had asked us or told us before Emily’s coworker mentioned it in passing. That the running-writer had used the contact information for Olof he was provided with at the start, and gotten the story right, the first time.

All of this was poorly done. I know that our news media is broken. I know that the sub 24-news cycle is absurd, that journalists are under more pressure to get likes and shares and retweets than to get their facts straight, because profit matters more than truth.

And I know that I don’t care about any of those bullshit reasons for making avoidable mistakes.

These stories, like all news, are about people. In this case, they were about one of my best People, and anything that was wrong or inaccurate or sloppy about her is painful, because all we get from now on are memories and sharing stories. Hannah has become a finite resource, in some ways. While I have the rest of my life to tell Hannah stories, there is also no second chance for how news of her death entered the worlds she touched.

It is that lack of care and respect that enrages me about things that were written about Hannah, that people who wrote stories about Hannah without knowing her and without reaching out to those who did know her. It was, actually, kind of the professor to say he’d read about Hannah—my fury is that there is any inaccuracy about my sister in the world.

It’s quite bad enough that she is gone.

Hannah was such a stickler for truth and accuracy and responsible grammar, though, that it is a little insulting to have to correct these statements. I’m sure there are more places than I know that wrote about Hannah—rightly and wrongly—but there is only so much policing the internet for accuracy that I have the stamina to do. It should not fall to the bereaved to correct the record of a passing—the record should be correct before it is published.

My mom asked me today if I thought there would be a time when we’d run out of Hannah stories, or if people who love us would simply have had enough of hearing the same thirty-nine years of stories about Hannah.

I don’t think I will ever be sick of them.