I learned Thom Lieb died by searching his name online.
It had been over a week since I heard from him, which wouldn’t have been a big concern — since 1990 we’d often go long, long stretches without communicating outside of social media and Christmas cards — except that I was helping him finish an important project and time was of the essence: Thom was dying, and the project was his life’s story, told in large part through the music he loved.
We’d known each other over 30 years. He was a tough, precise, demanding journalism professor at Eastern Michigan University; I was an older student with a little talent, a full-time job, and a sketchy college career. That we met at all feels fatefully serendipitous; I will forever be thankful that our paths crossed.
Thom had a reputation as a challenging teacher: he cut slack for no one. Students had to work hard to get good grades. An A from him was like hitting the writing jackpot, and after a series of middling grades, I felt like I had snagged myself a Pulitzer the first time he read one of my pieces aloud to the class. “I can’t pick any nits with this one,” he said.
I could write, but Thom taught me to write well, to pay attention to word choice, to take those words and build them into sentences and paragraphs, and then to edit and polish them until they formed a final piece with its own rhythm and sound and shine. He understood the relationship between words and music, how well-crafted stories are to a reader what popular music is to a listener.
Knowing that about him makes the title of his autobiography — “Facing the Music: My journey to find myself and my tribe” — perfect.
Thom also gave me the single most important piece of career advice I’d ever been gifted.
I took Thom for every journalism class possible, but before I could finish my degree, he got a job at a university in Maryland. I was close to finishing my degree when I submitted my resume and writing samples to The Livingston County Press, hoping for freelance work, which I got. My first published story was about two sheriff’s deputies getting hurt while folks were fighting after last call outside the Shady Lady Saloon in Fowlerville. The story made the front page and I was hooked.
A couple assignments later, I was asked whether I’d like to interview for a full-time reporting position. Of course I did, but someone with daily newspaper experience got the job, someone who was also getting married and going on a honeymoon before starting. I was asked if I could fill in for a couple weeks.
Of course I could, but the problem was that I had already registered for what might have been my last semester at EMU. I knew Thom was packing up to move east; still I reached out to him for one of the most important pieces of advice I’d ever been given.
“Take the temporary job,” he told me. “There’s nothing more anyone can teach you. And you’ll get some clips out of it that will help you get a reporting job.”
And so I withdrew from Eastern and never looked back. Before he left town, Thom gave me his copy of “The Literary Journalists,” which I cherish to this day.
Those two weeks of filling in at the newspaper stretched into nearly 20 years working at a job I loved. And none of it would have happened if I hadn’t taken that first class with Thom. I remain eternally grateful for his tough teaching, as well as for his belief in me.
Over the years, I helped him a bit on a couple journalism text books he wrote. I contributed a piece on writing headlines, focused on the one I wrote that earned a mention from humor columnist Dave Barry: “Search for woman in fertilized egg suit goes nationwide.” (The admittedly clunky headline was for a story about the search for a Pinckney woman who fled the state with her son in a custody battle; she had previously been embroiled in a lawsuit with her ex-husband over the fate of five fertilized eggs, which were stored at a fertility clinic in Ann Arbor.)
In “Editing for the Digital Age,” which was published in 2015, Thom thanked me in the acknowledgments: “Another former student — and at this point, longtime friend — Maria Stuart offered feedback on chapters along the way and provided one more set of eagle eyes during the editing process.”
A decade later, early in September, Thom emailed me with hard-to-hear news and one final request. “I recently received the prognosis of as little as 1 to 6 months. I have just been accepted into home hospice,” he wrote, explaining that in the spring he had started writing his autobiography focusing on all the music in his life. “It’s something I have to finish if at all possible.”
He asked for any assistance I might be able to provide.
I dropped everything to help, I worked as fast as I could, and I prayed he’d have 6 months at least.
Thom emailed his files and I got to work. We emailed back and forth for a couple weeks. Thom shared the frustration of his pain, and the speed with which he answered my questions slowed. But just as I started to worry that he’d taken a turn for the worse, he’d reply.
Until he didn’t.
A whole week went by; I searched his name and held my breath, crossing my fingers he was still on this earth. But up popped his obituary. Thom died in the early morning hours of Oct. 13, leaving his final project — the story of his life — unfinished.
I didn’t know what to do. I had no idea of his life in Maryland. I didn’t know anyone connected to him.
But I received an email in early November. Thom had shared my contact info with a friend who misunderstood the scope of what I could do to finish the book, and there were a couple chapters missing, chapters of his life about which I had no knowledge.
There was nothing more I could do.
And so it is that this lovely, deeply personal story of one music lover’s life will remain unfinished.
But I will share with you the preface, with which I fell in love.
Tell me a story. One with a range of people, both likable and loathsome. One with bits that will make me laugh until my sides ache, and others that will break my heart and move me to tears. Make it real, and make it yours. Because your life has had all those elements, no matter how mundane and boring it might at times seem to be.
Don’t trust others to tell your story — if they can even be bothered to — because they’ll likely reduce it to trite generalizations about what a good parent/spouse/sibling you were, about how well you did your job, and how much your service to the community meant.
In doing so, they will likely miss your essence, what made you YOU, what the true driving forces were behind the unique path you carved over your few or many years.
I became convinced to tell my story after the loss of the love of my life and the invisibility of me in the stories that then were told about her, as well as shortly thereafter coming face to face with my own mortality. My hope is that you can connect with at least parts of it and come to better appreciate your own story and the passions that guided you through it.
Once you do that, take the time to tell your own story. No matter how short or long or how widely you share it, give yourself the pleasure of self-discovery. Chances are it will also enrich the lives of others who come across it.
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