The Value of Struggle: On My Friend, Alison Parker

It’s 6:58pm on a Thursday night, and we are, very literally, a couple of minutes away from an hour-long budget meeting. Fifteen of us are uneasily rocking back and forth in our rolling chairs in the bleakly dank basement of Anthony-Seeger Hall, just a few feet back from South Main Street in Harrisonburg, Virginia. As college journalists, this is our proud, outdated home, where we gather four times a week for not enough money and not enough recognition. Our budget meeting – a biweekly gathering to discuss the litany of section stories the editorial staff has lined up – is going way longer than usual. On this particular evening, you can chalk that up to Torie, our editor-in-chief, who is eviscerating our story ideas, one after another, like neatly lined paper lambs to the slaughter. Torie’s just doing her job – the more scrutiny a story idea undergoes, the better it’s likely to turn out, of course – but that hard reality doesn’t make this particular night any less agonizing.

“So your section has a column, an album review, a feature on a student organization, and…”

“A second column.” That’s Greer, one of our life editors.

“Do we really want to stack up two columns like that?” Torie asks. Greer doesn’t seem to have an answer. At least, not one that Torie is going to agree with.

I’m coming up soon in our little circle, and honestly, I’m not nervous. Is my story budget perfect? Probably not. We’re still working on fixing a club sports feature story that was submitted two weeks ago by a new writer, and I have no idea what I’m writing my own column on just yet. But we’ve got five solid pieces in the works for Monday’s edition, and for sports, that’s a Burgundian abundance of riches if we ever had one.

“Every time we’ve had a romance column, it’s super cliché. Can we try something else?” Torie is still gunning.

I turn my head and make eye contact with Alison, who flashes me an uneasy smile before returning to her notes. She’s sitting maybe six or seven feet away, just opposite me and a little to the left. For those sitting between us, my easy smile and casual confidence is comically contrasted against Alison’s furious scrawling on her own budget slip of paper. Just before meetings, section editors print out a dozen copies of their story budget and pass them around the room for reference; Alison’s own personal copy that she’s kept for herself looks like a bar napkin that Hunter S. Thompson might have taken notes on during a bender in Vegas.

“What’s wrong?” I mouth to her. Of all the people in the room, Alison is probably the most tenured, and the least in need of such maddening anxiety.

Alison looks at me, motions toward Torie with her eyes, then glances back down at her own budget. She looks up at me again, cocks her eyebrows, and returns to her notes. She hadn’t said anything, but her message was clear. Are you not paying attention? Torie is in rare form tonight.

She wasn’t wrong. As if on cue, Torie turns her focus to the Sports section.

“What’cha got, sports?” she asks, her voice higher than usual, trying to return some sense of energy to the room.

“Well, we’ve got two football stories – the game recap and a smaller stats piece,” I begin. “I’ve also got a column coming out on fan attendance at JMU football games, and there’s a men’s soccer game we’re going to be covering over the weekend. Oh – and we’ve got a Q&A with a field hockey player.” I sit back in my chair, looking smug. That’s a ton of stuff. I looked at budget meetings as if they were sparring matches between my section and the Editor-in-Chief, and I felt sure I had just won the first round.

“Why so much football?” Torie asks. “Aren’t there other sports going on we can cover?”

I could pause and consider my answer, but I don’t. “When it’s football season, that’s all anyone really cares about,” I say off-hand. It’s probably not the best thing to say.

“Where are the feature stories?” Torie asks. “Feaaaaaatures!” She holds the note with enthusiasm, like some sort of newspaper cheerleader. I’m not a huge fan of feature stories, but I know Torie is. I’ve intentionally held our feature story back for this very moment. In fact, I predicted this precise series of events to Alison and my co-editor Wayne before the meeting even began. Here comes the trump card.

“We actually do have a feature,” I come back with. “It’s on a club soccer player. It’s a friend of Alison’s.” I look over to my left, beaming. Alison smiles back.

“Is that the one by the new writer?” Torie asks. “I’ve read it, and it’s pretty rough. There’s no flow to it at all, and we need more sources. Right now, it only quotes one person throughout the entire article.”

I can’t believe this.

“And I don’t want us to do anymore Q&A’s, not unless we’re short on content. I want to tell stories.”

There goes another one. The room is dead quiet.

“So, it sounds like all you have is some soccer and football stories. Is that right?”

“Yeah,” I finally eek out after several seconds. “I guess.”

There’s an awkward pause. Then, Torie speaks again. “Oh-kay.” She really draws out the word, summing up everything, and nothing, in one disapproving comment. And in this moment, I’m not sure if I should be disgruntled, ashamed, or completely apathetic. I sit seething in my chair, silent.

Torie turns and rolls her chair, pivoting to look at Alison and her co-editor, Jen.

“News?” she cues. Her voice is strained and high-pitched, searching for whatever secret reserves of enthusiasm she has left. Judging by the exasperated look painted on her small, blonde head, she couldn’t find any. And I understand why. News is the last to go on this particular night, and because of the fluid nature of their content, they’re often the hardest budget to parse.

I slide my cell phone half-way out of my pocket to look at the time. It’s 7:10. An hour ago, I was chipper and upbeat, looking forward to my night out. Now, I’m slouched down in my chair and, with no end in sight, I might as well nod off for a minute. I start to close my eyes.

Then, there’s Alison.

“We’ve got some great stuff tonight,” she begins. If she had been nervous earlier, she wasn’t letting that on now; her voice is laced with measured enthusiasm and layered with ambition – the desire to impress. I open my eyes. Alison is sitting straight up on the edge of her seat, agenda in hand, with her bright green blouse bobbing and rippling around her pointed hand gestures. By the starry look in her dark, focused eyes, she’s about to talk our ears off.

“The board of visitors is meeting tomorrow afternoon, so Eric is going to cover that. There’s also been a string of burglaries on the north side of town, and we’re following up with that break-in off Port Republic…”

Alison’s budget washes right over me, going in one ear and right out the other. All I could do is silently stew in my juices; I had decided I wanted to be angry. But there was something about the way Alison handled those meetings, how she prepared her notes and story listings. Watching her and Torie go back and forth was like watching two prize fighters in the ring, each one eyeing the other up and down while trying to land a blow the other would have to concede as significant. She embraced the fight. It was a thing of journalistic beauty – two fearless young women at the top of their game, one trying to defend her pitch, the other trying to break it down.

Suddenly, my ears work again. “That all sounds good. See everyone Sunday morning.”

Torie didn’t have to say it twice. The staff stood up, replaced their chairs at their desks, offered pro-forma, over-the-shoulder goodbyes to everyone, and rushed the doors as if James Madison himself were handing out autographed copies of the Bill of Rights. And honestly, on most other nights, I would have been in lock-step with the others. But I was still burning too hot from my interaction with Torie to leave the office and actually interact with other human beings, so I decided to lay down in our video-editing office and cool off.

90 surprise minutes later, I woke up.

It’s after 9 o’clock at night, and it’s safe to say that happy hour is definitively over. The video room is soundproof, so it’s as quiet as space in the bright, cream-colored room. I open the door back to the main office to gather my stuff and head downtown, where the rest of the staff surely is by now. But instead of more silence, I make out the rhythmic pecking of a keyboard coming from one corner of the room.

It’s Alison’s corner. She’s still here. Working.

9pm doesn’t seem that late, and in reality, it’s probably not. But the 62 hours between the end of a budget meeting on Thursday night and the beginning of a 12-hour production day on Sunday are sacred. For us, this is the only thing we have resembling a weekend. And since many of us have Friday classes, other jobs, and, in Alison’s case, weekend Intern work at WHSV, Thursday nights are particularly valuable.

“You’re still here?” Alison asks surprisingly, as I re-enter the main part of the newsroom.

“I could ask you the same question,” I reply, equally as incredulous.

Alison sighs, but finishes typing her thought before she responds. She leans out from behind her computer, references her near-flawless story budget, and smiles to herself.

“I’m just trying to fix some stuff,” she says.

It was only a few weeks earlier when I’d sat outside that very office, head in hands, wondering whether or not a job on the editorial staff was for me. I had known Alison around a year at that point; our interactions had been brief, but meaningful. I would come into the office twice a week to pitch an idea for an opinion column or a women’s basketball feature, but would linger to talk video games with the Life Editor, a shaggy-haired guy by the name of Jeff Wade, or else just aggressively flirt with my own editor, a young, banter-prone blonde named Carleigh. Eventually, other editors could put my name to my face. But with their own budgets to work on, and me, unnecessarily rambling on about whether or not Desmond Miles would be killed at the end of the new Assassin’s Creed, no one spent too much time reaching out to the ultimate Newsroom cliché -- the opinion columnist who couldn’t shut up.

Well, no one but Alison.

She had no business reading my stories, and, generally speaking, not too much interest in Sports. Professionally, she was way, way too far ahead of me to devote any of her precious time to my opening forays into journalistic expression. And I mean that figuratively, of course, but I also mean it literally – the News section often started on A3, and Sports was routinely relegated to B4. If your section is up where the prime real estate is, like Alison’s was, you really had to go slumming to find my columns on Joe Paterno and Louis Suarez. Self-interest and self-reflection couldn’t be your basic resting pulse; you had to devote yourself to an analysis of our product on a holistic level.

That didn’t matter to Alison, though. She understood that, as a team, water didn’t necessarily have to seek its own level. If the best of the newsroom could buoy the rest of us up, then maybe, just maybe, we could create something special.

It would have been easy for Alison to recognize this and ignore it. She clearly understood Newsroom dynamics on a deeply conceptual and psychological level, and for a 20-year old, that could have been more than enough. But it wasn’t. She wanted to be a leader. She wanted to be the instrument that lifted us up.

So, she was. Whenever I wanted another opinion on a lede, she had her glasses out; she could reframe any story. She’d offer up unsolicited encouragement after I had a column come out every Thursday. When I had a tricky interview or a niche sports article on my plate, I always felt comfortable mining Alison’s grey matter for better angles I could approach a story with. When I had to drop what I was doing and fly to Oklahoma to cover a complex WNIT final in 2012, Alison was there with advice and expectations on how to best cover the team, outside of writing just another game recap. (Meanwhile, my own section editors forgot to send my press credentials.)

And when I was mulling a huge devotion of my time, energy, and emotional well-being to the Sports Section, all she could offer was encouraging words.

“It’ll change the way you remember your entire college experience,” she said. “It’ll change how you approach your writing.”

“That’s great,” I said. “But I’m a little nervous of working for Torie.” At the time, I was completely intimidated by our editor-in-chief. I’d watched two editors quit now, and I couldn’t help but wonder if some sort of impossible standard was being set.

“Also, I kind of buy her sister alcohol sometimes,” I admitted. “Do you think she knows?”

Alison laughed, and told me not to confuse Torie with Freddie Kruger. She was a tough editor, but an astonishing percentage of the time, she genuinely had her finger on the pulse of what readers wanted.

“Don’t worry about Torie,” she said. “In the end, all the hard work is its own reward. Ultimately, that will mean more to you than anything else.”

Alison went back to her desk after that. Ten minutes later, Torie walked by and invited me into her office to talk. Before the end of the day, I had committed myself to the open Sports Editor position.

“UGHHHH!” Alison and I are on the other side of 9:30 now, and she’s still slogging away. Inspired by her commendable and slightly insane work ethic, I’ve also decided to stay, at least for now, so that I can iron out the wrinkles in that club feature that we haven’t quite gotten right yet. Suddenly, Alison erupts into tantrum, venting her frustration with bad storytelling in the only way she’s ever figured out how – gutturally grunting as loud as possible throughout the newsroom.

“UGHHHH!” she yells again. It’s hard to blame her. You can’t steep tea without the pot whistling. Alison operated on such a high level at all hours of the day that, every once in a while, she just had to burn off the stress for a few seconds.

“What’s the matter babe?” I call her babe, sometimes. She thinks it’s cute, in an annoying, Little Brother-Big Sister kind of way. Technically, I’m six months older than her, but that didn’t matter. If you knew Alison, she was your big sister.

Alison speaks, and her voice is mantled with high-pitched frustration in a slight southern drawl. “I’m up to the fourth time in this article that this writer has used passive voice for no reason at all. It’s news writing. Shit!” She’s talking faster and faster.

“Also, I’m trying to get our Monday budget straight for Jen, because I’ve got a board meeting for Alpha Phi, and I won’t be able to work on it over the weekend because I’ll be at WHSV.” She takes a breath, then intones again, her subtle accent more prominent than ever. “And there’s a bad car crash on Reservoir Street, and I can’t get ahold of anyone at the Police Department,” she adds, almost panting.

“I didn’t think I would be here this late, but I have to get all this done tonight. I have to.”

It’s Thursday. She absolutely does not have to. I tell her this.

“Al, you’ve got plenty of time. I think you should get out of here.”

She rolls back to her desk and flicks her blonde hair back over her shoulder and out of her eyes.

“Maybe you’re right,” she concedes. But she’s affixed those dark, swirling eyes of hers to the computer screen, scanning for more passive voice. On second thought, I’m not sure she’s conceded anything at all.

Alison wasn’t always stuck in an office at 10 o’clock at night. When she could carve out time to get out with friends, she did. Between her sisters in Alpha Phi, her friends in SMAD, and us at the Breeze, she pretty much always had someone to explore the night with, should her calendar allow it.

On one particular Saturday night, I was at my friend Brian’s house sipping South Streets and watching college basketball. After the game ended, Brian and I – comfortably buzzed and thinking with the wrong part of our anatomy – noticed a few dozen girls spilling out of the adjacent apartment. Like any good journalist, I went to investigate.

It turned out to be the start of an Alpha Phi party, and of course, Alison was there. We quickly embraced, and, after several introductions were made, agreed to partner with each other for some drinking games. (I’m not sure Brian was very happy with my ditching him for Alison, but after I introduced him to a few of her sorority friends, he got over that pretty quick.)

Upon reflection, I’m not sure I ever actually saw Alison all that drunk. She had either too much self-control or too much class, or else could just hold her alcohol well. I wish I could say the same, especially for that Alpha Phi party. Maybe it was the darker, higher concentration beer I had been drinking before the party, or maybe I’m just not really as cool as I think I am. Either way, my frontal lobe has a tenuous relationship with large portions of that night.

What I do remember is how regal a socialite Alison was, gliding from person to person in her little black dress, conducting her own brand of Saturday night interviews. It was impossible to resist her bubbly little laugh – you were just drawn to it. Conversations with her were almost addictive, in a way. She was never quite the life-of-the-party girl, but everything always seemed more fun when she was involved.

Naturally, I showed up at the office the next day, 35 minutes late, nursing a hangover and trying to piece together my story budget. Alison had already sent three of her stories to the copy editors and was working on her front page design; I was wondering why the hell 9am felt so early in the morning, and whether or not I should take two or three additional Advil. By noon, she was finalizing her page, and had enough time to run out and grab coffee for everyone who had decided to work through lunch that day.

“I know you don’t drink coffee, usually,” she said, as she eased a hard plastic cup in front of me. “But I think you might need this today.”

I thanked her, and asked how she was doing.

“I’m great,” she said nonchalantly. I couldn’t tell if she was talking about her head or her page.

Even if that Sunday was miserable, it was times like that Saturday night that pulled us closer together. We were thrown together in the newsroom by fate; we got along in the outside world purely by choice. So when I’d see event invites for Facebook events or Snapchats from bars I would recognize, I would send her a funny text, and she’d get a good laugh. When a bizarre story broke about a, ummm, weird post-game incident with the JMU drumline, we spent the better part of a month bouncing fake, pun-filled headlines back and forth at all hours of the day. After graduation, she’d tweet about covering a meth bust, and I’d joke that she must be coming back to Harrisonburg. Or she’d see sports news and text me immediately, in a state of unnaturally feverish excitement – even if it wasn’t her section, even if she wasn’t at JMU anymore – simply because breaking news guaranteed her a state of pure elation. When I was living with three sorority girls in my fifth year of college, she came up with the perfect moniker to describe my living quarters – Drowning in Estrogen – a phrase I liked so much, I turned it into a series of short stories.

And even as the inevitable post-graduation drifting began, she’d still text me every so often, asking how the job search was going. It was never an inspiring answer on my end, but I settled for living vicariously through her post-grad accomplishments, closely following her career from Harrisonburg to North Carolina and back to Roanoke. We’d think of each other during Frog Week or on holidays, texting each other that we need to make plans as soon as possible, we need to get together when you’re in town, we need to catch up on each other’s busy lives.

“Happy Thanksgiving to the most outspoken guy I know,” she once texted me one Thanksgiving afternoon.

“I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be a compliment or a dig,” I responded wryly. She laughed. We made small talk, with me trying to recover from my family’s early dinner while she was waiting to eat at all.

“I’m literally starving,” she said.

I told her she should have come eaten with us in Richmond. She said if it wasn’t such a far drive from Martinsville, she might have.

“I’ve never been to Martinsville,” I told her. “I’ll have to visit some day.”

On Monday, August 31, 2015, I made my overdue visit to Martinsville. It wasn’t a happy occasion – five days earlier, Alison had been killed by what I can only describe as a wholly psychotic lunatic with a Glock-19. In the aftermath of her death, the 2012 staff had been invited to celebrate Alison’s life in her home town. There were a couple of bars liberally handing out cups of beer and wine. Three giant projection screens hung around the room, flashing through pictures of Alison, radiantly beaming at all of us, now from beyond the grave.

As I walked up to the entrance, I ran into old names and faces. Jen and Jeff. Meaghan, another former editor of mine who I eventually replaced. Margie Currier, our extremely talented design editor. Anne, a former copy editor. IJ, a sassy little Asian girl – now a grown woman, pursuing her passion as a Dancer in Boston – who eventually succeeded Alison as the next news editor. There was Dylan, who had rode down with me, who wrote a great tribute to Alison in the Richmond Times Dispatch just a couple days earlier. There was Wayne and Laura and Jessica and Bradford and Liz and many, many more Breezers.

And of course, there was Torie, who I immediately hugged and felt boundless gratitude for. For all our collective angst, I felt nothing but appreciation and love in that moment. In hind sight, with the added filter of 2+ years and serious personal maturity, I understand just how right Torie was about an embarrassingly long list of topics we sparred over, up to and including that horribly long budget meeting. I probably didn’t learn more from any one individual than I did from her. Well, except for maybe Alison, of course.

In some strange way, we were all a family – forged in the crucible of journalism, thrown back together by fate to mourn the loss of the very best of us.

We walked in, together, as a group. And seeing those screens projecting those photos of her… a part of me died with her, right then and there. Five days of Facebook tags and news clippings, melancholy interviews and memories out of time, swarming and forming a steely punch right in the gut. It didn’t feel real. She couldn’t be dead. But she was. This was real. This was hard. This was happening.

About an hour in, Mrs. Parker spoke briefly but eloquently about her wonderful daughter. She encouraged us to share stories of Alison, who lived a remarkable life, and yet, it seemed as though she had hardly just begun to live at all. But we did, as a house band played somber, acoustic covers of Tom Petty’s Learning to Fly and Van Morrison’s Brown-Eyed Girl. At times, it felt as though we had cried until our tear ducts simply had nothing left to give.

Past that, I won’t say much. That night belongs to the ages; those stories aren’t mine to tell. But as I lay in a cheap motel bed that night, contemplating the elegies that had been shared by the Parkers and my fellow Breeze family, I thought of Alison’s News Desk headshot that flashed upon the screens on the wall that night. Her perfect smile, her warm, piercing eyes, her bright ambition, all cruelly extinguished. I drifted into the black of unconsciousness, the lyrics of an old Eagles’ track reverberating through my mind:

All alone, at the end of the evening
As the bright lights faded to blue
I was thinking about a woman, who might have loved me,
That I never knew…

The office door slams, and a quiet “Oh!” crashes through the office. A photographer has stopped by late after an event to drop his work off and hadn’t expected to see the lights on, let alone two people still working after 11 o’clock at night. Yet here we are, Alison and I, playing some perverse workaholic’s game of chicken. And while this sort of activity might have been normal for a hard-nosed news editor, I was flat-out allergic to this kind of advanced preparation. But you don’t walk away from a Blackjack table when you’re on a heater, and I don’t get up from my computer when I’m writing hot. So, taking my cues from the tired blonde two desks down, I kept at it, letting the words and clever phrases flow forward from my fingertips and onto the page.

Finally, right before 11:30, Alison finally got up, gathered her things and shut her computer screen off. “I’m done,” she announced. She was satisfied, but exhausted.

I breathed a sigh of relief. “I’ll follow you out,” I said, opening the door for her as she staggered under the load of her books and bags. “Let’s go get some sleep.”

She sighed again.

“That’d be great," she admits. "But I’m headed home to do homework."

I walked to my car, 100 feet from the newsroom. She was parked much farther away than me. I was ready to leave, but before I did, I leaned back on the edge of my bumper, suddenly sleepy again, watching her click-clack in her heels into the distance. Her silhouette blurred, then darkened, then disappeared into the black altogether. I heard a car engine stutter to life and watched her turn the corner and drive away into the dark horizon. She was gone.

It’s Tuesday, September 1, the day after Alison’s wake in Martinsville. After some truly nightmarish sleep, I wake up in the morning to the motel’s stale cereal and drive back to Harrisonburg, where I still happen to live. On the way back into town, I get off one exit early. Dylan, my travel partner and former Breeze copy editor, hasn’t seen the new Breeze Office yet – these days, The Breeze isn’t confined to the dingy basement of Anthony-Seeger Hall anymore.

“This set-up is unreal,” Dylan comments as we walk through the high ceilings of the new, modernized office. “Can you imagine if we had this nice of a place when we were here?”

I hear his question, but I don’t answer. I’m lost in thought, staring at the new News and Sports desks, now even more closely aligned on one side of a tight, squared-off section in the middle of the newsroom. Twenty feet behind it is a silver-studded wall of accolades – dozens upon dozens of rectangular plaques, mounted on a tan wall in the room’s foreground. I look at the bottom, most recent row, and notice my name shining with the others. Chase Kiddy, it reads. Mark of Excellence. Sports Columns.

Just to the right of my own award is another plaque. It has bigger, bolder letters. 2012 Sweepstakes Winner – The Breeze. And right underneath the embossed letters, I make an important addition, in my head. The first Sweepstakes award in The Breeze’s 90-year history. Score another point for Torie and that not-so-impossible standard I had been afraid of. She clearly knew what the hell she was doing.

Adjacent to that were blank spaces, probably reserved for the back-to-back Grand Sweepstakes awards from 2013 and 2014. And as I’m contemplating those, I hear an exuberant shout. We turn around to investigate.

It’s Brad Jenkins, the Breeze’s kind, soft-spoken general manager. He’s just discovered that the Breeze is a finalist for a 2015 Pacemaker award from the Associated College Press.

Brad says what we’re all thinking. “It’s nice to get some good news, after everything that’s happened over the last week.”

I couldn’t help but think, in those precious, revelatory moments, of Alison. She’s moved on to be something greater, something ethereal, something elemental. But her presence could still be felt, and her legacy could still be witnessed. There, in that hallowed room, there might be some semblance of her that could still be personified, through hard work, strong reporting, and bona fide truth-seeking. She had made her mark. If nothing else, she had left at least one thing, at least one of us, better than she found it.

The next day, the editorial staff would no doubt be trotting in, right around 9am, ready to put out their writers’ fires and maybe set a few more of their own. There would be fights and arguments, probably some tears and definitely some jeers. There will be reason to doubt what you’re doing. There will be cause to wonder if the end result justifies the time and energy expended. There would be some resistance.

But I know a news editor who wouldn’t have it any other way. For my friend Alison, there was value hidden in the struggle.