Celebrating a Montana life … and love | Mary Sheehy Moe

The first rule of politics, they say, is to show up. I spent last weekend obeying that rule.

On Friday, I joined Montanans from near and far to celebrate the life of Steve Doherty, a life that ended after a 10-year battle with cancer and a 50-year battle to preserve and protect the Montana he loved. Like most of us who grew up east of the Rockies, the expansiveness of those landscapes shaped his expansiveness of spirit.

Like many of us, when he came of age he left Montana, certain that a bigger, more consequential life awaited him back east. What he learned there was that he needed those Montana landscapes, that openness of mind and possibility, to be happy. He came back home.

Working for Northern Plains Resource Council in its early years, he helped farmers, ranchers, and community members throughout eastern Montana protect their air, waters, and livelihoods. He realized a law degree would increase his impact so he got one. And as a lawyer, state senator, and chairman of Montana’s Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission, his impacts were substantial. He showed up. He stood up. He spoke up.

“Yet he did so with a smile on his face, radiating from his heart and offering an infectiously positive attitude” former governor Steve Bullock remembered. “The epitome of a happy warrior,” Doherty was not just a dreamer, but a doer pragmatic enough to make dreams come true.

Surveying the gathering of Steve’s friends, fans, and family spanning seven decades at his memorial, I marveled at all the lives one Montanan can touch … and all the Montana landscapes this Montanan made sure remained untouched, yet accessible; expansive, but awesomely ours.

There is a time for every purpose under heaven. The time to mourn behind me, the next day I drove to Helena to dance.

I’ve known the groom for 25 years — as an economic development leader in the Golden Triangle, as chairman of Montana’s Board of Regents, and now as a legislator. I’ve known the bride for 10 — as a distinguished educator, a candidate for statewide office, a legislator, and now president of the Montana Federation of Public Employees.

But like most Montanans, I “knew” them by what I had observed or read about them as public figures. All I knew of their private lives was that they had both raised wonderful children and lost spouses in terribly difficult ways. Nonetheless, as I remind them ad nauseum, I was the first to know this day would come.

Nearly three years ago, I ducked into Worden’s in Missoula to warm up before the homecoming parade. A gaggle of legislators inside was gearing up for the parade as well. These two first-term legislators were among them. As I watched them interact, I realized that, as far as they were concerned, they were the only people in the room — or in the world, for that matter.

They’re in love, I thought to myself, and they don’t even know it yet.

By last Saturday, they’d figured it out. In the beautiful new Montana Heritage Center, they convened some 250 friends, colleagues, and family members to celebrate their marriage. Legislators from both sides of the aisle were there, huddling up “herd-bound” as legislators always do, leaving the rest of us Montanans from far and wide to renew old acquaintances and make new ones.

We dined, we danced, we delighted in the moment. And as I watched these newlyweds beam at each other, I saw the same thing I’d seen in Worden’s three years ago — something more than love, really. Serenity. Comfort. Joy.

I drove home, glad I’d shown up for both events. Sometimes we need to be reminded that public figures are just like you and me really, Montanans who get sick or hurt or disappointed and, if they’re lucky, get wiser and stronger as a result.

“The land — the prairies, grasses and waters, the air — can overcome almost any insult,” Steve Doherty once observed. “But our souls, our ‘Montana-ness’ — is a precious thing.” We preserve it by showing up for one another. Yes, times can be hard. But this is next-year country. Ours is a geography — and a history — of hope.