Upside Down and Personal

 

It was- a weird week. Russia invaded the Ukraine...a country that is not much farther away from Vienna than our westernmost province of Vorarlberg. My work-week did not end on Friday due to all-day workshops on Thurs-Sat, which deprived me of a proper two-day weekend. Just like the previous week I had quite a bit of in-person social interaction (fingers crossed that the tests continue to come up negative) and I was once more reminded to not postpone things and to seize the day. On Friday morning, having just checked the news headlines to make sure Putin had not declared war on the EU yet, I received a text message from a friend that I had to read twice to make sense of and to truly absorb the meaning She informed me that her husband and nephew had died in an avalanche in Switzerland. Just like that. I had briefly seen both her and her husband on the slopes in Carinthia on December 28 and now she is a widow. When I mentioned this to a colleague later that day, she asked if it was the same case of the 52-year-old and 18-year-old she had read about on a news site the day before. I googled and yes, the almost identical short article had appeared in almost all national newspapers and more. I had read so many factual reports on similar incidents before, thinking "tragic", but then forgetting it. Obviously it's different when you know the people behind the headlines. Just like the statistics of dead soldiers and civilians in Ukraine who are either just numbers or personal tragedies.