A Tear in Life's Fabric

Something is happening. Maybe it happens to everyone eventually. It’s as if there’s a tear in the fabric of life, a break in the force field that holds us to this planet.

My friends, my colleagues, the people who have defined my life for so many years – they’re disappearing. One by one – dropping off like the leaves in the early part of fall. And you know what happens as fall deepens. The leaves become a blizzard. A blizzard of death.

Death. No amount of reasoning about nature and the way it is can make me fear that word any less. And in the past few weeks death seems to be stalking the streets I know, scooping up not only old people whose lives had shriveled up like their bodies – but much younger people who had everything to live for.

My friend and colleague Roger E. Hernandez died over the weekend. He was 53. Chalk up another one for the big C. http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003847809

It’s not that I saw Roger or his wife Dianne every day. Or even every year. They are my neighbors, living with their children just one town over. The people you keep saying you must invite over to catch up – as time speeds up and runs off the clock. How many more friends and colleagues and family members are in that category. How many more people will be gone before I get around to saying hello?

Roger was a funny, nice, straightforward guy. Not someone you would easily forget. When I first met him he was an assignment editor at the TV station I went to work for - more than 20 years ago. He was old enough when he left Cuba with his parents to remember how it was – and to be a lifelong foe of Castro. The stuff of many good - shall we say - discussions. We would laugh at Roger’s slight accent; we could never understand his directions over the noisy police-type radios we all used then to communicate with the “desk” when we were out on a story. Roger, being Roger, would laugh as well. Sometimes.

We became a family at that TV station. Dianne and Roger moved on and got married. Some of us also moved on. But the family bond has held. We used to come together at odd times to see photos of babies just born or talk about new jobs - or old ones. And now – a much older family – we are coming together too often to cry instead of laugh. At wakes and funerals and memorial services.

Like Roger’s.

If he was looking down on us, he might have been surprised at how many people knew him, were shocked at his death and already missed him. Perhaps they too felt a little break in the force field, a tear in the fabric.

Because when there’s a tear here – and a break there – one day the force field disintegrates. The fabric shreds. And not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men (and women) can put Humpty Dumpty together again.