{"id":1511,"date":"2008-06-17T22:30:24","date_gmt":"2008-06-17T22:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/17\/at-tim-russerts\/"},"modified":"2014-08-04T05:24:16","modified_gmt":"2014-08-04T05:24:16","slug":"at-tim-russerts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/17\/at-tim-russerts\/","title":{"rendered":"AT TIM RUSSERT’S WAKE: A LITTLE BIT OF HOW IT SEEMED"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"20080617201506_edited\"<\/a>So many people here and on Twitter have been talking about this; I thought I’d just tell you what it was like.<\/p>\n

I got there at around four.\u00a0 The line went from the door to a large room at St. Alban’s School<\/a> just next to the National Cathedral<\/a>, where the wake was, up the stairs and a long walk to the driveway, around to the Cathedral front lawn.\u00a0 The last little bit was lined with wreaths – some of them very large – of flowers from friends and colleagues.\u00a0 There were several TV trucks and\u00a0 groups of reporters and camera people on folding chairs under the trees.<\/p>\n

This had begun at 2PM and would last until 9 — sad, but not dismal.\u00a0 It was a beautiful day, sunny, breezy, not at all humid – just gorgeous.\u00a0 And we were all grateful to be there.\u00a0 It was a generous thing for the Russerts to do in the midst of their own grief — allowing friends, as well as admirers who’d never met Tim but felt that they knew him anyway — to act on their own sadness.<\/p>\n

I talked to some random people in line with me: a woman who’d not known Tim at all but just wanted to be there and, happily, an old friend and pollster with whom I waited most of the way down the hill.\u00a0 I hadn’t seen him in a long time, so we caught up on our lives and our kids and our sadness.\u00a0 I started to tell him about all of Tim’s kindnesses to my boys when they were little; he started to tell me about his son’s internship at Meet the Press<\/a>.\u00a0 Any one of Tim’s friends would have had a dozen stories just like those.<\/p>\n

\"Russertm_wake_line_g_edited_3\"<\/a>
\nAll along the way, very kind staff and parents from the school, where Tim’s son Luke had gone, were there with name tags that said “volunteer” under their names and offers of help, directions, a place to leave a note for the family, ice water – just gracious and kind.\u00a0 I saw, as we arrived in the room itself, that the casket, covered with white flowers with a note that said “Love, Coco and Luke” was being guarded by what looked like young soldiers out of uniform.\u00a0 I’ve since learned that they are high school classmates of Luke’s who will stand guard throughout the night.<\/p>\n

We made our way past the casket in two lines, one on each side.\u00a0 Tim’s wife Maureen Orth was there, thanking people for coming.\u00a0 Then we were out, in a hallway, where another volunteer offered us the opportunity to leave a note on paper that would be bound into a book.\u00a0 The line was long, and each person spent considerable time – the comments were anything but brief.<\/p>\n

\"Russert1\"<\/a>
\nJust at the end, as we made our way out, stood this photo, the one I used yesterday, up on an easel.\u00a0 I was so glad to see it there – not because I’d used it too but because it was a declaration, which I’d felt and clearly his family felt, that the joy and mischief of this man was what we should take with us back into the world.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow there is a small funeral and a memorial service at the Kennedy Center which I’m sure will be amazing.\u00a0 And all of it will help those who loved and admired this larger-than-life presence deal with the reality of his absence.<\/p>\n

I want to say that, because of all the posts on Twitter and here on in the blogorama, I felt I was representing many of us and left a note that said as much.\u00a0 It was a privilege to be there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So many people here and on Twitter have been talking about this; I thought I’d just tell you what it was like. I got there at around four.\u00a0 The line went from the door to a large room at St. Alban’s School just next to the National Cathedral, where the wake was, up the stairs … Continue reading AT TIM RUSSERT’S WAKE: A LITTLE BIT OF HOW IT SEEMED<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,6,27,2764,7],"tags":[590,1437,1438,1436,258,1434,1435,1428],"class_list":["post-1511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aging","category-culture","category-current-affairs","category-i-seem-to-write-a-lot-of-obits","category-life","tag-funeral","tag-maureen-orth","tag-mourning","tag-national-cathedral","tag-nbc","tag-russert","tag-st-albans-school","tag-tim-russert"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-on","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1511"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2478,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1511\/revisions\/2478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}