After writing newspaper stories for 26 years, the volume of all those written words sometimes solidifies in a feeling of deja vu - been there, done that.

Features about unusual hobbies, the struggles of cancer victims or the triumphs of disabled athletes are stories I've written many times over the years. I've ridden in helicopters, hot-air balloons and even cloud-seeding planes to get stories. I've climbed mountains and badlands to get the news, and I've listened to the intimate details of stories hundreds of people have been willing to share.

Each story was important in its own right, but details fade through the years, a survival mechanism, I guess, in journalists. If we were to remember everything about every story, our minds would be too full to function.

But there are stories you never forget, those compelling characters and situations that can't be erased, even if you want to.

I can count on one hand, well, maybe two hands the number of stories that have brought me to tears over the years. One was an inside look at hospice care a few years ago, when I traveled to Essex to interview a dying father of three, a guy in his 30s as I recall. I made it through the interview, but when the hospice worker dropped me off at my car (we had carpooled) I must have cried for 15 minutes, outright sobbing, before I could begin to drive. Later, when I watched a video the man had made as a posthumous gift to his children, I teared up again.

Then there was the story about a Kalispell couple who made the decision to put their 40-year-old severely developmentally disabled son in a group home after a lifetime of caring for him. While most people would have been somewhat relieved to be released from the enormous task of care-giving, the aging couple agonized and cried over their decision, feeling selfish by doing what they deemed best for their son's future.

The emotion was palpable at the kitchen table the day I talked to them, and I cried.

It's odd, but the stories that have wrung me out emotionally are also the ones in which many details are still vivid in my mind, how it was snowing big soft flakes in Essex the morning I talked to the dying man, how the flannel shirt he was wearing had once fit fine but know hung on a body emaciated by cancer. At the farmhouse where the disabled man grew up, I remember how the photographs on the wall documented a lifetime of memories.

Most recently, it was the funeral of a 21-year-old Troy soldier killed in Iraq that made me weep. The memorial service for Marine Cpl. Raleigh Smith was a community gathering of more than half the town of Troy. While it was sad, I didn't know Raleigh and thought I'd be able to cover the event unemotionally attached. I was OK until they played a video that included footage of the soldier as a fun-loving teen-ager and family portraits that showed happy times in Raleigh's younger years. It made him human, not just a detached military photo of a boy in dress blues.

Smith's father, an inmate at Montana State Prison, was brought to the funeral in leg chains and handcuffs and sat in the front row not able to even wipe away the tears at his own son's funeral. I was criticized later by several readers for mentioning the father's situation in my story about the funeral, but I still maintain it was a detail that couldn't be ignored.

What brought me to tears was the stark contrast between the father sitting near the casket in a prison uniform and restraints and the smiling photos shown of him and his two sons years ago. I cried for what had been and what might have been. Embarrassed by my tearful state, I left the school gymnasium and ducked into a hallway to compose myself.

Later, at the burial, I cried again, struck by the sheer beauty of that day, a crisp, sunny January afternoon with new-fallen snow on the mountains that cradled the rural cemetery. The alpenglow that brushed across the slopes for just a few minutes seemed a poignant reminder of how fleeting and uncertain life can be.

When I told one of our editors about the emotional toll the funeral had taken on me, he offered this explanation: It's not how much you cry that matters; it's when you can no longer cry that's cause for concern.

Indeed, when stories cease to penetrate the tough skin that's apt to form over reporters' emotions, especially writers who have been there, done that a thousand times, that's the day it's time to close the notebook, put down the pen and find another way to make a living.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com