Ceci n’est pas un blog

When an email has as its subject line only the name of a distant relative, friend or acquaintance, even when it lacks the ominous “sad news” tag, my heart sinks. This week, it was the younger brother of a dear friend from high school days. I haven’t been in touch with the friend much at all in recent decades, I’m pretty sure the last time I saw him was at my last big birthday party in New York, in 2002. Nonetheless, he’s an incredibly special person for whom I still feel much love. So it was crushing when I learned this week from a mutual friend that his younger brother, who in my memory is still a laughing lanky teenager, had died at 40 of the same brain aneurysm that took their mother from them at a young age. (He’d known for several years that he carried the gene, but with no way to know if or when the disease might strike.) I felt heartbroken and helpless. Sad for my friend, and his dear father who was a friend of our family and my first Russian teacher. Sad that I know how little any condolences I can send from the remove of years will mean. And of course, making a mental list of special people I have known that I want to get back in touch with.

Later the same week, my emotional equilibrium was thrown abruptly in the opposite direction by news of someone I had never even met. Walking through the supermarket listening on my Public Radio Tuner to whatever station had All Things Considered with no begathon in progress, I heard them tease a story “a New York Times reporter held by the Taliban has escaped,” and literally felt my skin flush with excitement. Sure enough, the newscast confirmed that David Rohde was free after more than than 7 months in captivity. While he was in captivity, the story had been very effectively kept out of the news (thanks to all who respected the news blackout, who knows what part it played), but one of my colleagues was good friends with him and his wife Kristen, so I had been vicariously experiencing their terror through periodic updates ever since his capture.

As today is Father’s Day, I’m thinking most of the heartbreak of my old friend who has lost his son, and of the unfathomable joy of David Rohde’s father, who has his son back.