RSSDeath in the Family
Jan 02
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A ringing phone woke me up early Tuesday morning. It was already time to get up, but I didn’t want to. By the time that I rushed to the receiver, the call already went to voice mail.
“Hm, Aleks, my mom just died,” said a voice of a good Friend of mine, whose solemn tone broke my heart. “Give me a call back.”
I immediately called him back only to hear his greeting message on the answering machine. So I left a message.
Friend and I go back to 1993 when both of us spent some time with American missionaries in Riga, Latvia’s cappital city.
He started attending a school in England that year. I followed him the next year.
We were housemates there for a year, until he left for the U.S. in 1996. I followed him the next year.
Our paths continued to cross. He graduated from a university in Nashville, Tenn. I graduated from a school in Michigan. And both of us considered one Michigan family as our own. Neither he nor I have any siblings. Both of us have somewhat similar backgrounds, coming from broken homes. Both are a mix of Russian-Latvian blood, more so that we care to admit.
His mother was his last connection to his home country. On our trip to Latvia in March 2006, he told me that nothing really held him there any longer. Nothing except his mother.
There’s more to say about the situation. But now it’s not the time.
Eventually, we’ve decided that he should not be going to Latvia to take care of his mother’s funeral arrangements alone. So I’m going with him. Our plane is leaving from Chicago Thursday afternoon and we’ll be in Latvia some time Friday.
In the meantime, I will post some of old articles on this site.
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