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Gayle Sims, empathetic Inky obit writer

WHEN YOUNG people think about getting into journalism, they often have visions of breaking the big story, exposing wrongdoing or kicking a president out of office.

WHEN YOUNG people think about getting into journalism, they often have visions of breaking the big story, exposing wrongdoing or kicking a president out of office.

What they don't dream about is becoming obituary writers.

To someone like Gayle Ronan Sims, that's too bad.

Gayle was one of a breed of obit writers who bring compassion and love to a job that not a lot of people want, who realize that even the most humble subject deserves to be honored.

"Her job, as the Philadelphia Inquirer's chief obituary writer, was to summarize the lives of those who rarely were known outside their immediate community," wrote Adam Bernstein, Washington Post obituary writer and her good friend.

"An obituary is a life, and Gayle wrote thousands of them. Her patience, her eccentricities, her devotion to community made her impact enormous."

Gayle died April 16 of multiple organ failure after a double lung transplant. She was 61 and lived in Merion.

She had been homebound for months with respiratory problems, but continued to write obituaries for the Inquirer, working at home attached to an oxygen tank.

"Gayle had an ineradicable passion for her work, and a compassion for the people she wrote about and their families," said Bill Marimow, Inquirer editor. "Gayle's dedication was absolute and second to none, and we are really going to miss her."

Marimow said that she approached the lung operation full of the "courage, determination and passion that personified her work, and personified her life in the newsroom."

Gayle had a knack for milking family members of every cogent detail about the subject. She would stay on the phone chatting and commiserating even after the facts were in.

"To Gayle, each new story seemed something more - an opportunity to meet a new friend," Bernstein wrote. "Gayle lingered on the phone and lingered and lingered, and by the end of her calls, she would often call me up and say how wonderful a family member was and how she and the person were going to meet up for lunch or dinner because they had so much fun talking.

"She was extremely sympathetic, with a soft and soothing voice that made probing questions seem as gentle as an invitation to have another scoop of sugar in your coffee."

Gayle was a very private person who did not want her own obit written. She didn't like talking about her past, her upbringing in Missouri, her divorce after an early marriage.

She was born in St. Louis to Irish-Catholic parents. She graduated from high school there as the class valedictorian and worked to pay her own way through the University of Missouri. She started out studying electrical engineering, but switched her major to journalism.

After a stint as a publicist in the governor's office and a job with the Denver Post, she arrived at the Inquirer in 1987.

She started as an assistant on the news desk, moved on to be a page designer, graphics coordinator, video editor and a features writer before being assigned to obits in 2003.

She had a horrifying experience on April 4, 1991, when a plane carrying Sen. H. John Heinz collided with a helicopter over the Merion Elementary School where her son, Taylor, was a student.

Heinz and three others in the aircraft were killed, as were two first-grade girls in the schoolyard. Taylor, who was inside the school, was unhurt. Gayle rushed from the newsroom that morning to be with her son.

She later became friends with Heinz's widow, Teresa, who later married Sen. John Kerry.

At its convention this weekend in Charlotte, N.C., the Society of Professional Obituary Writers plans to announce the creation of an award named for her to be given to writers who carry on her legacy.

Besides her son, she is survived by a daughter, Jamie Sims, and her former husband, James Sims.

No funeral service is planned. *