Journal: News & Comment

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

A harder hit

It's been quite a summer so far for celebrity demises: John Lee Hooker, Carroll O'Connor, Jack Lemmon, Chet Atkins, Jim Ellis (founder of Usenet), and Mordecai Richler all died very recently.

Today I heard of someone else's death, and it affected me though I had never met him. I passed by the cubicle of a co-worker at the company for which I'm currently working on contract. (She also used to work with me at my former employer -- in fact, she was the one who had to fire me last January when the layoffs came.)

She was quite upset, and revealed that her sister's 28-year-old husband -- whom we'd talked about just yesterday at lunch because of his recently-discovered diabetes, a disease I've had for ten years -- had died suddenly in Argentina, in a fall apparently caused by low blood sugar. She is flying to her home country of New Zealand as soon as she can to be with her sister.

Celebrity deaths may get the attention, but the impact of other strangers' deaths can be more significant. This one was for me.

 |