I got nauseous on the job at about 2 p.m. yesterday, and couldn't shake the feeling the rest of the day.

The chain of events started at 11 a.m. when I got a phone call from our city editor, telling me that a student had plunged to his death the night before, falling from a dorm window at Carthage College, about 10 miles south of us. We rarely cover Carthage, but we'd gotten a tip about the circumstances of the death which looked like it would lead to a full blown news story, rather than a just a brief two-paragraph item about the student's fall.

I didn't know the student's name...and, it turned out, neither did the reporter...when we got to the Carthage campus shortly before 2. I'm ashamed to say that this was just another abstract news story with no name or face when we got there, even though it was about the sudden death of a student.

I drove into the dorm parking lot. Fortunately I didn't get out of the car with a camera around my neck. Instead, I stayed in the car and looked around, and that is when I first got the queasy feeling. I drove back out to the main campus road. and waited for our reporter.

I'd seen a car with a half dozen somber-looking people standing between the car and the dorm. There was no doubt in my mind that the boy's parents were there taking his belongings home. I had another feeling, and that was that if someone from any one of a number of other media outlets were there, they would have gotten out of the car with a camera, shoved a microphone in someone's face, given an insincere expression of their condolences, and asked how anyone and everyone was feeling and if they wanted to talk about what's his name's death.

The reporter and I chatted on the main campus road. I saw a friend who confirmed that the boy's parents were, indeed, at the dorm at that moment, meeting with the college chaplain. The reporter had already made some calls for the story, and the tip was not panning out in direct relationship to the boy's death. It seemed to have been a suicide. I noticed that a flag 100 yards from the dorm was at half staff. Passersby told us that was a customary tribute when any member of the college community died.

I knew that the only picture I needed was of the flag, showing the school's tribute to the dead boy. I walked up to the flagpole, and that was the second time I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. There was a permanent marker hanging on the flapole that reads "In Memory Of." Below it, though, there already was a sign with Michael R. Archer's name. This was no longer an abstract story, there was now a name to put with it. The sign also had the years of his life, 1979-1999. I shuddered when I saw that, because 1979 is not just another year, it's the year that Adam, our oldest son, a college student, was born.

Behind the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism
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