Communal grief (2)

Slightly less than a year ago, I wrote about the death of a young kibbutz member; yesterday we were informed that his grandfather, also a kibbutz member, had died. I had worked with the grandfather for several years until his retirement about ten years ago, aged 80. I remember that we held a retirement party for him, in which both people from the kibbutz and work participated. I was asked (in advance) to say a few words; I prepared a speech that was longer than required, as there was so much to say about this person. In the speech (whose text I cannot find), I compared him at one stage to being like a second father: his eldest daughter was born a week before I was, and he would always ask about my studies.

The path that I take in the early morning while walking the dog goes past this member's house. This morning I was thinking about what to write in his memory, and that the kibbutz was fortunate in that none of the outrageous acts of the Hamas terrorists over the past week had affected anyone here. How wrong can one be?

Barely ten minutes ago, a notice was posted on the kibbutz internet site informing us of the death of one of the kibbutz sons, who was serving in the army near Gaza. My wife works with the father of this soldier. I am numb.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
207	11/10/2009	This tickled my fancy	Dog
638	11/10/2013	More books	Literature, Tom Clancy
1081	11/10/2017	Research questions	DBA
1346	11/10/2020	Continuing the story of porting an application to Windows 10/Delphi 10.2	Programming, ClientDataSet
1535	11/10/2022	Another DBA update	DBA