Everything Except Our Stories

Jim Harrison’s death in 2016 still darkens my days. I knew him for two decades. It’s a loss felt not just personally, but also by a worldwide audience that a friend aptly called the “Tribe of Jim.” Even the world-wandering celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once confessed that he wanted to be Jim Harrison, proof positive, I guess, that Jim was in a category all his own.

Seven months after Jim died, I arrived in Livingston, Montana, for a celebration of his and his wife Linda’s lives. She died Oct. 2, 2015, and he grew physically weak, emotionally bereft, too stubborn to give up chain-smoking and drinking, despite recent attempts at moderation. Five months after Linda passed, Jim died, on March 26, 2016, in the middle of composing a poem at his winter casita in Arizona. (His untitled final poem is available in the 2018 paperback edition of Dead Man’s Float, from Copper Canyon Press.)

Harrison’s 78-year-old heart stopped, and he keeled over. That’s the stuff of legend, like painter and fly-fishing author John Atherton dying in a Canadian river while fighting a salmon. I guess some