WAYNE MORIARTY,
A valued colleague’s transplant odyssey touched the hearts of those who worked with him
never considered myself much of a journalist.
Excellence in this area I reserved for those watchdogs who would spend days poring through documents, building contacts, working one idea, one tip, one instinct — all so a story may, or may not, find its way into publication.
I never had the patience for that sort of crucially important and labour-intensive work.
Not being much of a journalist is a curious admission from a man who has worked as one for the past 37 years — 12 of those perched upon the editor-in-chief throne here at The Province.
As a journalist, I preferred telling simple stories. Here’s my favourite newsroom one. Silvio Dobri was a 51-year-old copy editor at The Edmonton Journal in 1998. He was a quiet man who teemed with virtues: hard-working, reliable, conscientious ... He was admired by everyone who worked closely with him, and liked by everyone who just knew him as a colleague.
He was also a thin man who didn’t smoke, walked to work and, frankly, looked to be in the kind of health most 51-year-olds would envy.
Then this one day, April 24, 1998, he arrived at work looking wan and sounding breathless. An ambulance was called. Over the course of the next couple weeks, a manager in the newsroom, Alan Mayer, would send emails to all staff updating Silvio’s condition as it lurched from worrisome to dire.
What started out as a “heart problem” turned into a triple bypass, which turned into congestive heart failure, which turned into an emergency heart transplant.
It was all so dizzying to get these updates, each one more grim than the one before.
After the transplant, as he recovered, updates on his condition stopped. Then, one day, word got out that Silvio and his new, used ticker would be stopping by The Journal for a visit.
He arrived with a cane and a glacial pace. As he moved deliberately to the hub of the newsroom, a roar of applause grew with each step. He stopped at a desk where there was a cake in his honour. Everyone in the newsroom had gathered closely. The applause lingered. There were tears on the cheeks of everyone who truly knew the value of a good heart.
I worried, in that moment, that there was more love in the room than this stranger’s heart could stand. It was needless worry. Silvio is, today, alive and well — his new, used heart having gone “lub dub” more than 800 million times now.
This is my final day here at The Province. I’ve greatly enjoyed the job. I’ve greatly enjoyed the conversation with all of you. But my breath for it has all but run out. And so, dear readers, as Sir Walter Raleigh so bravely said with his head on the executioner’s block: I have a long journey to take and must bid the company farewell.