into the bereaved circle..

i swear something stuck out about his name.. and i cant even explain why.. because its different to my wife's or anyone in her immediate family.. but when I read that he had died in the war yesterday while fighting in gaza i reread his name several times.. it made me awkward.. i swear im not making this up..

anyway last night when i came home from work the girls were a already showered and headed to bed.. we heard some explosions which turned out to be in an adjacent town just a few kilometres away.. i tried to keep my wife calm telling her that they were clearly not overhead because if they were a siren would have been sounded.. she was only partly consoled by my rationalisation..

while i continued to do some work from home she immersed herself in the incessant news reports and within moments she struggled to hide a solid sob as she reviewed the list of recently killed officers.. she told me that apparently one of them was a distant relative.. it was him.. the one i stalled over.. like a pathetic card trick where the card you stare it is the card that is presented to you by some cheesy magician who you shrug off as a loser.. only not a card.. a dead cousin.. leaving you with no amazement.. only sadness..

he is related to my wife on both sides of her family and known to various closer relatives of hers..

we tried to introduce other topics into the discourse of the evening.. to replace the heaviness.. the girls had just gone to bed and i was concerned that the volume of our sadness would disrupt their efforts to sleep..

the news services then filled with mostly reports of airlines cancelling flights out of and into israel.. it appears that another cousin arriving from overseas wont be able to make it.. who cares about the accommodation booking that they may be stuck with - we wanted to see them.. we love these cousins and we had planned how we would share the next few weeks together with their kids.. looking forward to meals at our and their rented pad and afternoon beach sessions..

and then you Segway in your mind to the people in gaza.. who would be silly to even delude themselves that they could make plans..