Staying Fit
In the February/March issue of AARP The Magazine, Donovan Webster detailed how his battle with alcohol led to a fatal car accident. In July, Webster took his own life. His widow, Janet Webster, tells us the story beneath the story.
My husband died last summer, but I lost him five years ago. More on that later.
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I met Donovan when I was straight out of college and he was a fledgling editor and freelance writer. After he successfully launched his career, we married, settled down and had two children.
Or, I should say, I settled down. He did not. Donovan’s job took him all over the world. We used to joke that his editors had a competition to see who could kill him first. Donovan was a real-world Indiana Jones. He scaled Mont Blanc in Italy and rappelled into a live volcano on the South Pacific island of Vanuatu. He searched for ancient dinosaur bones in Mongolia and found the trail for black market animals in Madagascar. He dove for pirate treasure off the coast of Cape Cod and sailed with modern pirates in the South China Sea. He looked for unexploded ordnance from World War I with France’s démineurs in Alsace and hunted birds with the Yanomami tribe in the Orinoco River basin. He traversed the Burma Road on an elephant’s back at least three times. I could go on and on.
But when Don was home, he was truly home. His office was in our house, and he would go there after taking the kids to school, and work until it was time for his noonday run with our goofy chocolate Lab, Traveler. Then Don would work again until the kids got home. He would help them with homework; he coached their sports teams; he acted in community theater so he could spend time with them. He even learned how to dance the ländler so he could play Captain von Trapp when our kids performed in The Sound of Music. When the children worried about his going off to some far-flung, sometimes dangerous place, he would try to make them feel better by making a joke of it, saying, “What could possibly go wrong?”
Donovan wrote about people, culture, history and human pain. He mentored young writers and connected them with others in the industry. He helped create organizations to ease the suffering in the world. One of them was even a corecipient of a Nobel Peace Prize. Donovan worked and worked to make the world a better place.
Donovan Webster photographed in 2017, after serving a 21-month prison sentence for involuntary manslaughter.
Kevin Cooley
