When someone well-known has died, we all say the same things: She was so young. So full of life. A ray of sunshine on a cloudy day.

Seventy-five percent of the time, they’re just words. We don’t really mean it; they’re just nice things to say about the recently departed.

But now Ann Murray Paige has passed and I’m scrambling for platitudes that aren’t nearly powerful enough. She really WAS young. She really WAS full of life. To say she was a ray of sunshine is to badly understate the luminosity of that grand star. Ann exuded the kind of warmth and good cheer a soul can’t deny. The saddest sack on the gloomiest day had no choice but to smile when Ann offered up one of her own. And Ann ALWAYS offered up one of her own.

My God. It’s been 10 years since I’ve seen her, maybe more. And yet when I heard the news, I became breathless and disoriented. Surely, I’d misunderstood. Surely, someone else’s name had been uttered in connection with the grim report. Ann Murray? Gone? It seemed a physical impossibility, like rain falling up or night following the dawn.

My God. Some people, when you meet them, you have an abstract feeling that they will be around forever. They are lights burning so bright over your world, you expect them to be damn-near eternal, like stars in the sky.

I met Ann sometime around 1995 when I was spending many of my days covering courts. One murderer or another would be on trial and Ann would be covering it, too, for a local TV station. To that point, I had no use for TV reporters. I found them slick and conniving, not to be trusted. The men were blow-dried glory boys, the women empty-headed beauties who didn’t know a Harnish hearing from a poker game.

Then came Ann to sweep me off my feet. She swept us all off our feet, I think. As we milled around on the stomped grass in front of the courthouse, waiting for news from above, Ann was our nucleus. She was the one to scold us fellows when our jokes skipped past the borders of good taste. She scolded us with quivering lips, because she thought our jokes were funny, too. She was just too classy to show it.

It was Ann who would flick a flower at you and then pretend someone else did it. It was Ann who would steal my pencils, but that was perfectly OK because I frequently cheated off her trial notes. It was Ann who convinced me that print reporters and TV people were not cats and dogs, after all. We could co-exist happily because when you got right down to it, we were all working in the same cold trenches; all scrambling for the same bits of news like madmen plucking coins off the ground.

Ann was all smiles and sanity on days when the horrors of the courthouse seemed to darken the day. She was sincere when most of us were phony. Ann was a girlish giggle when you really needed one and a source of sound advice when you needed THAT even more.

Really? Gone? All of that?

Our time passed soon enough and that was no surprise. Ann was one of those who seemed bound for greater things and it was a pleasure to watch it happen. I think of her every time I bound up the courthouse stairs she once graced. I’ve always missed her and always hoped her well.

Sometimes, in the dusty lot behind the newspaper, I’ll gather with some of the old-timers and we’ll talk about the way things were back in the day. Beepers instead of cellphones. Pens and paper instead of fancy recording devices. Days of chain smoking and hard drinking, a time when news was something you went out and hunted like an animal. Back then, we went head-to-head with the TV stations and we would speak with scowling disdain about those weasels and their treacherous ways.

“You remember Ann Murray?” someone will eventually offer.

“Oh, God. Ann Murray. She was the best.”

“Absolutely the best. They should make more like her.”

Then we’d get to allowing that Johnny Hopperstad wasn’t such a bad guy, either. Or Harry the cameraman, or Chris Facchini or that dude from Channel 8 who could run at 25 mph with his giant camera in tow.

“That was a pretty good group, when you get right down to it.”

“Sure was. But Ann, she was the center of the universe.”

Nods of agreement all around.

She really was. And though we never got close enough to exchange Christmas cards or emails when the technology came around, she always felt like part of my life; a pretty, smiling connection to the old days I’ve come to think of as a Golden Era of local news.

Ann Murray, gone. Rain falling up and east living where west used to reside. It’s sad and terrible and painful, but mostly it just makes no sense. They say the brightest stars burn out the quickest, and I always thought that was just lip service. But it applies here. Lots of platitudes do.

When they say life ain’t fair, my friend, they really mean it.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You can email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

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