Biographical research can take months, even years, to complete, and what ultimately emerges is less the subject than the writer’s own interpretation of them. Each fragment of evidence is like a piece of a puzzle, capable of reviving a forgotten voice and transforming the long-dead into someone who feels familiar. A stranger, in this way, can become a companion. Yet history is often selective; newspaper obituaries frequently concealed as much as they revealed, and what we wish to believe is rarely the full truth.