The most important story I wrote this year recounted the most meaningful interview I've ever done.
Parts of it replay in my head when I'm sick with fever, or half-awake before dawn.
I drove to Bryon on Feb. 11 to interview residents and deputies about the 32-year-old mother who had shot her four daughters, then herself, in their little snowclad home one day prior.
The sheriff gave a trauma-laced interview. The next-door neighbors wept. A fellow reporter sent to me an ethereal recording of the mother, Tranyelle Harshman, singing a Chris Stapleton karaoke cover about a year before.
Over the days that followed, the mother and her last surviving daughter both died.
And I called the late mother's husband, Cliff Harshman.
I think of news reporting, and the honest pursuit of it, as a viewpoint estuary from which the truth ultimately flows. But I still get bull-crapped and led on and sweet-talked and one-lined on just about a daily basis, as everyone assumes his or her best face for me.
When I talked to Cliff, he didn't have a mask left to wear.
His world had shattered in public view, in excruciating detail. He yelled at me for not seeking and trying to understand the harrowing mental conditions that had haunted his wife in the days before the shooting. He wept over what he'd lost. He discussed in biting, deliberate syllables what he'd experienced that week.
I asked if we could have an in-person interview over coffee.
Amazingly, he said yes.
Amazingly, he apologized for yelling at me, even though I hadn't minded it and in fact had welcomed, even loved, the raw gust of truth and righteous anger.
Amazingly, he told me to drive safely, to the Powell coffee shop where we'd planned to meet.
There I sat on Feb. 14, across a dim-lit table from a man who had nothing left to do but pray, and who voiced a grim resolve to tell me the truth so that at least - at least - the gaping public would have the most accurate account of this already-exposed tragedy.
Here was honesty. No masks, no status, no bullcrap left to trade. Just a man whom life had pushed to its last ultimatum: the choice of whether to keep breathing.
And he did. And he has.
May we all dare to be so honest.
Byron Man Discusses Wife's Last Days Before Murder-Suicide
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
