At times like this you press rewind buttons - in this case on a journey of memories spanning some 50 years.
Last week, I spent a few hours with the veteran journalist Jim McDowell in a small room on a hospital ward; there with his wife Lindy and their family and with my wife Val.
There to show support. To remember good times. To say goodbye.
Lindy called me the following day with the news that Jim had passed. It was all very sudden - the turning of a page and, then, a reading back into some of the stories of life.
I knew Jim outside of his reporting on the dark side of the news of this place - know his writing as a sports correspondent covering athletics; words - some of them about me - that date back to 1976 that I've re-read in recent days.
Ten years later, he was best man at our wedding.
Then, in 1996, I visited him in hospital after he was injured in a helicopter crash landing. I was with Stephen Grimason - the journalist who two years later would break the news of the Good Friday Agreement.
We brought McDowell a bottle of whiskey and some flight magazine with a cover headline that wasn't at all appropriate given his circumstances.
Humour helped us through difficult times. That was our excuse.
Those who know the politics of the City Hall in the 1980s-1990s, will know how McDowell confronted the nonsense there, and some might remember the column he wrote to former Secretary of State Patrick Mayhew.
If I recall it correctly, he addressed it to Sir Mayhem.
Jim gave me my first job in journalism. Allowed me to learn from my mistakes.
He was as hard as nails and as kind as they come.
In 2001, I called him with the news that his colleague Martin O'Hagan had been shot dead. He didn't want to hear or believe what I was saying.
Many times in the 1980s, I was on-the-run with him in the marathons in Belfast and in Derry.
He loved sport. He loved people. He loved Belfast. He loved his family.
McDowell was stitched into the fabric of this place - one of the city's legends.
RAN A GOOD RACE: Jim McDowell (left) and Barney Rowan competing in the first Belfast marathon back in 1982
See also Máirtín Ó Muilleoir tribute here.
