I mourn

I spent my summer of 1997 at a retreat in a small town some 40 miles outside of Moscow. My wife and I were feeling adventurous and idealistic and so we packed a months worth of kosher food, diapers and our 8 month old firstborn Yehuda. The summer was a one of a kind spiritual experience interacting with and teaching a Russian Jewish population that had been cut off of their Jewish heritage for 75 years. It was also a learning experience for us. It took us westerners to live with bare necessities and to make do with baby baths in buckets and lots of kasha.  There were plenty of memorable moments like when Yehuda started showing symptoms of the flu and a well meaning local called a world war 2 era ambulance that drove us the few miles to the local clinic, its sirens wailing horribly off tune. It turns out that this clinic was the very same that my favorite writer Anton Chekhov used to practice medicine 100 earlier. The doctor told us to boil eggs and place them on his face.

At the end of the retreat we decided to travel to St Petersburg along with another couple and their baby. St Petersburg was beautiful in a jaded kind of way. Like a woman who is still beautiful in her 50s.  We spent a week traveling the Palaces and the playgrounds of the Czars and taking in quintissential St Petersburgh moments like attending a ballet. Our apartment was in a building that looked to be straight out of a Dostoyevsky novel. Looking back from 2017 I marvel at how isolated we were. There was almost no communication with the world at large. No way for anyone to get in touch with us and no way for us to know what was happening in the world as there was absolutely nothing available to read in English. 

Imagine my surprise when we came to Pulkovo Airport on the morning of September 4th 1997 and I happen to notice the headline of the International Herald Tribune "Prince Charles Returns Home for the Peoples Princess' Funeral".

I could feel the color drain from my face as I read that Princess Diana had been killed 3 days earlier in a car accident. 

It's difficult for me to mourn someone I did not know...but I can definitely mourn a world in which it was possible to go 3 days without knowing that Princess Diana was dead.