This rag -- originally called FW Weekly -- survived its first few years because of the stubbornness of a handful of folks who believed with a kind of nutty optimism that this town would support a serious journalistic alternative to the staid, sacred-cow-protecting Fort Worth Star-Telegram. One of the brightest and most versatile players in those early years was Tiffany Robinson Rives, Girl Friday to the publisher, public relations guru, art director, lovetorn columnist with a quirky sense of humor, a woman who had a “great earthy vibe” as one friend remembered, and a great smile.

One would never know by that grin and accompanying laugh that Tiff had been living in death’s neighborhood since she was 18. When she first came to work for the paper in 1996, she had already lived 10 years with a transplanted liver. Neither repeated bouts with a pesky organ that kept trying to reject, nor the devastating effects of anti-rejection drugs ever slowed her down -- and she never cursed life for the lousy hand she’d been dealt. She worked tirelessly to keep the paper thriving, married a former Weekly staffer, Justin Rives, and left in 2000 to open an animal care business. But even though Tiffany, like Emily Dickinson, could not stop for death, it finally stopped for her. She died at 38, of liver failure, at home a week before Christmas.

Though not a journalist by training, she understood the profession’s first duty: to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The paper she helped hold together in those cliff-hanging early years is still doing just that. Rest in peace, Tiff.