by Susan Brind Morrow
December 6th, 2024

My marriage to Lance Morrow began in Jerusalem in the 1980s. Lance was writing two back to back cover stories for Time Magazine: one on the 40th Anniversary of Israel, and the other on the Palestinians. Typically he had proposed the Palestinian cover story himself because he wanted to see, and to present, both sides.

I was on a foundation grant, living outside in the Red Sea Hills, the roadless volcanic landscape between Egypt and Sudan that was the home of the Beja. Lance was living in the American Colony, with its gardens of lemon and pomegranate trees and its walls of luminous Jerusalem limestone. We spent our honeymoon driving around Gaza, going through Palestinian refugee camps and meeting with the Israeli military almost forty years ago.

Lance always slept with a notebook and a pen in close reach to jot down his first thoughts on waking, got up at 4:00, had coffee in the dark and was immediately at work. He was a highly trained, highly disciplined classic writer who emblematically embodied that distinctly 20th Century American phenomenon: the intellectual as journalist- the independent mind as witness to history. Lance wrote 150 cover stories for Time Magazine, a record at the time, covering foreign wars, American presidential elections, the civil rights movement- one might say he was always there.

But I think of him primarily as a master of his own distinct form- the 800 word analytical essay- beautifully crafted pieces without a word that didn’t fit. Henry Grunwald spotted his gift and put him on the newly created back page essay for Time Magazine in the 1970s, for which Lance won The National Magazine Award. Lance’s parents were both Washington journalists and he grew up in Georgetown and went to the notoriously tough Jesuit school Gonzaga- three life conditions that went a long way toward forming the disciplined life he led.

We consulted each other constantly on everything, but mostly on ideas we were developing for writing, sitting down for lunch with white legal pads, “What have you got on…?” for we had a lot in common in what we knew and read, having both been immersed in Greek and Latin in our teens. We would argue, for example, about whether a fragment of Steisichorus was

Pou ma ta roda, pou ma ta uia, pou ma ta kala selena
Where are my roses, where are my violets, where is my beautiful parsley?(me)
(Lance)No,no,no- it’s…
Tadeta roda, tadeta uia, tadeta kala selena
Here are the roses, here are the violets, here is the beautiful parsley

We lived for thirty years on a farm in a valley between the Hudson and the Berkshires, and we lived a farm life. By preference we wore old clothes, drove old cars, did the dishes by hand, cut our own firewood, kept bees til the bears wiped us out, and slept on the kitchen floor by the wood stove in the winter blackouts. There were no vacations. There were friends.

When I married Lance, Bill Buckley sent me a copy of Webster’s Dictionary he had had bound in leather with my initials stamped in gold on the front, meaning to say- this marriage will be about words. We sailed with Bill every summer, swimming off the boat in the dark and playing the word game ghost over breakfast, scudding along the waves.

Old friends came to visit us for candlelit dinners in our green dining room, and on cold winter evenings there was tea by the fire in our library where we read out loud- all of Dickens, Homer in Greek, War and Peace at least twice. There were picnics throughout the year- even in the snow where we sat out with a thermos of hot tea to watch the minks slide down the frozen waterfall in the woods, or wood ducks come into the wetland in spring. We had a lot of animal friends- flying squirrels would sail around the house on their wings of soft fur in the middle of the night and come to our feet for the reward of a single blueberry. Little things like this brought good cheer, as Lance was always dealing with illness.

He had his first heart attack at 36, handing the cover story on the 1976 Republican Convention in Kansas City he had been up writing all night to his editor- and then keeling over. The second heart attack kicked in in 1993 at dawn when he had been working on a story all night at his office at Time. He called me in Cairo to say he was waiting for the ambulance and thought I should come home. When I walked into intensive care at NY Hospital eighteen hours later he asked me to bring him a typewriter and wrote the book Heart, writing in the shadow of death. Lance never let up on his work for Time. His editor had him covering the Starr Report from his hospital bed, with industrial staples holding him together from his throat to his ankle. Five years later when he was given six months to live after his third heart attack Lance became one of six experimental gene therapy heart patients, which greatly extended his life.

But you never would have thought of him as ill. He had a light touch, was a brilliant mimic, very funny, gave enormously to others and had a radiant intelligence that lit his face until the last day of his life, last week.

Lance had a beautiful singing voice and he liked to walk around
singing,

Bring my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my shield- oh clouds unfold,
Bring me my chariot of fire.
I shall not cease from mental strife
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Til we have built Jerusalem
In Englands green and pleasant land